Hacker News's upvote-only policy for stories means that unless a story is flagged so much mods remove it, it will hit the front page so long as a significant mi

Hacker News's upvote-only policy for stories means that unless a story is flagged so much mods remove it, it will hit the front page so long as a significant minority of users thinks it's interesting. There's no "critical" crowd control of users saying "No, this isn't worth my time, back down you go." Sometimes this is good, and allows controversial opinions to hit the top of HN; other times we get the Reddit effect, and short, fluffy pieces rise to the top instead of longer posts that might take longer to read, assess, and upvote. I find the set-up kind of ironic, because when I first joined HN I was a college freshman who posted some fairly fluff things I'd written in the hopes that people would read it and get to know me. Now that I'm working on more interesting things, I don't think I'll be bothering to submit them here, simply because I doubt they're quite easy enough to receive votes. All in all, I don't think it's that the system's broken – like I said, this allows controversial pieces to still hit the top – but it's a downside to the way HN handles voting that cannot easily be avoided.