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Ask PG: will disabling upvotes on the front page reduce hype stories?

14 points by ohwp ↗ HN
Lately there is a discussion going on @ HN about the quality of high rated stories. To me it seems people just upvote articles by reading the title alone instead of reading the linked article.

Will disabling the upvote button on the front page cause people to read the article first, or read the comments first and make a better decision about there upvoteabilities?

12 comments

[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 37.7 ms ] thread
lutusp
It's important to recognize that any method open to public votes can be played. When you see two or three posts with the same origin suddenly and inexplicably rise to the top of the rankings for some reason other than their obvious worth, you see the role played by gaming the system -- and that's a common occurrence.

> Will disabling the upvote button on the front page cause people to read the article first, or read the comments first and make a better decision about there [sic] upvoteabilities?

s/there/their/

That would essentially disable voting. I think they call that a draconian solution.

kbenson
Would it essentially disable it, or just reduce the points stories get drastically? I think only allowing voting within the comment page would make it more likely that votes would be on content (or up-voted summaries in the comment page, at least) instead of the headline. If this affected all submissions, would that be a bad thing?
lutusp
> I think only allowing voting within the comment page would make it more likely that votes would be on content (or up-voted summaries in the comment page, at least) instead of the headline.

Maybe. And maybe someone intent on playing the system would simply move to the comment page and upvote there.

anywhichway
I'm currently using an android app to browse HN which uses the hn api. No matter how you change the api there would be no real way of preventing app makers from allowing upvoting from their main story browsing page.
malandrew
Unless you only allow voting based on reputation like downvoting privelages, which is something that can be validated server side.
ibudiallo
I'm sure you are referring to the hyperloop post. I don't think the system is being game here, most people want to know about that piece of news. And if the post is bogus, well a moderator can simply flag it.
mangeletti
I think this would be much like disabling jobs for (or heavily taxing) rich people. When you reach the top, it is much easier to continue ascending, just the same as a larger lion has an easier time finding a mate, and gets fed first.

C'est la vie

lifeisstillgood
While not impossible, I think assuming people vote without reading is doing a disservice to HN readers. The ratio of hits on a story to upvotes is huge - from purely anecdotal data (mine and others) a 20x ratio is common. Since the ratio is so high, it seems reasonable to assume that most if not all votes came from people who did actually click through. I have no data on the upvote to comment page ratio but I would guess it is even higher.

Of course subject matter, headline, other people's comments make a difference, but I doubt there is a significant blind upvoting of something that hits the front page.

I think it is however a good suggestion - simply an invisible reminder that we put content first. I like it.

malandrew
Alternatively, how about a karma threshold to be able to upvote stories on the front-page? Make it the same threshold as downvoting, 500.

This should go a long way to prevent the redditification of HN.

If you aren't a committed participating member of the community, you don't get to push things to the top of the fron page as easily. It should also help a lot with sock puppetry, since it would not be trivial to create accounts to push things to the front page.

pearjuice
Just disable users to view their and other people their karma totals because the only thing it does is promoting the writing and submitting of content for the common denominator just to collect karma points.