I actually don't care about the status/karma aspect of votes.
Negative votes would be more constructive if reasons were given for it (aka feedback).
Positive votes, what is their use even? A "seal of quality" granted by HN users or simply a measure of how interesting a post appears to the HN crowd? It's probably the latter. Hard to make judgments about the general quality of the post by vote counts alone.
At least HN is not like the YouTube trending section where a lot of clickbaity videos appear.
You will encounter titles like:
"I ate nothing for 1 hour and this is what happened"
"I bought $200,000 worth of bananas and now I'm broke (and sad, lost in an island full of monkeys barely scraping by)"
"You won't believe this happened"
"Do this one trick (and waste 10 min of your time)"
"I almost got killed"
I'm sure you even encountered fancier ones, but these are what came off the top of my head.
How to get people hooked on our site long enough and make them watch ads? That's YouTube for you. HN is quite different and thank goodness it is.
"I ate nothing for 1 hour and this is what happened" "I bought $200,000 worth of bananas and now I'm broke (and sad, lost in an island full of monkeys barely scraping by)" "You won't believe this happened" "Do this one trick (and waste 10 min of your time)" "I almost got killed"
I'm sure you even encountered fancier ones, but these are what came off the top of my head.
How to get people hooked on our site long enough and make them watch ads? That's YouTube for you. HN is quite different and thank goodness it is.