Ask HN: Would allowing a down vote on submissions after a comment improve HN?

3 pointskeen15y ago2 comments

I don't want to get into the debate about whether HN quality is declining. I just want to explore how to improve the system.

Being the HN noob that I am, I was surprised to find that submissions can't be down voted. I always assumed that you could down vote submissions once you reached a certain karma level.

If the down arrow were hidden until the user posts a comment, it might encourage constructive criticism, partly because their own karma would be on the line (via the comment).

2 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

bigiain15y ago

There is a "flag" option on posts that appears when you get enough karma (I don't know exactly how much, and recall that it's a moving target based on total karma awarded, but it was somewhere round 300-ish points before I saw it first).

Enough "flags" and a submission becomes "dead" and you'll only see it if you've turned on "show dead" in your user prefs.

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bmelton15y ago

There are a TON of ideas being thrown around in PG's thread, but something in your comment sparked with me... I don't know that anybody's talked about putting a karma requirement on UPvotes.

Everybody's talking about modifying the downvote behavior (among other things), but if we required a breaking in period for new users before they could even be allowed to upvote, then that could give them a better idea of what the community's about before they could start upvoting the trivial nonsense that everybody wants to upvote when they're new.

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