If HN were more popular, would you bother voting on submissions?

[amichail]

Your vote here currently yields a lot of power and I suspect that this is part of the appeal to HN.

BTW, voting power could be reduced to enhance the quality of what gets to the front page by encouraging more people to vote on new submissions as reddit does. Namely, reddit shows a new submission at the top of the list on the front page to encourage more people to vote on it.

[jacquesm]

That would depend on how fast the new submissions were coming in. I suspect that at some level of popularity the current model would break and you would simply have to split up the site along thematic lines.

Maybe that points has already been passed, hard to tell, the line is pretty blurry.

The bigger power is the 'flag' option vs the voting, voting changes the ordering of things, flagging changes what gets to be voted on. But even that has its limits, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823567 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823568 are still active three hours after being flagged.

[knieveltech]

If HN was more popular I'd probably look elsewhere for my news.

[jrwoodruff]

I think (if I'm not mistaken) that your vote is also weighted according to your Karma level? Which would mean that even if it were more popular, your vote could still yield a lot of power, and if you were a noob, you would have to comment and vote to improve your karma for the sake of achieving significant power. So, yes.

I think that's part of why I participate here, and pretty much nowhere else. Not to put words in his mouth, but PG seems focused on community building with HN, and every aspect of the site, from the design to the functionality seems geared toward that. Hopefully those features will stand up to popularity and not be overpowered by dumb-masses, if you will.

[jacquesm → jrwoodruff]

I think the only weighting of the votes is based on their age, not on the karma of the user.

[stjarnljuset]

I would still vote since HN saves the submissions I voted on for me to look up later.

[joshuarr]

I already don't bother voting.