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Comment by ghiotion | Hacker News Reader

The downarrow is a good idea, until you start to consider the cabal of greasmonkey jerks auto-downvoting everything on the new page that wasn't submitted by one of their cretin brethren. Perhaps there could be some kind of difficulty weight a user inputs when they submit a story. More demanding stories get a 10. Cartoons get a 1. Then give more weight to upvotes on the more complex stories. Obviously, this has the potential for abuse with folks misrepresenting the complexity of their article. But that wouldn't be hard to spot.

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Another variant would be to have the weight be voted on. Weights only matter for a fraction of submissions, so I wouldn't want to complicate submission by making everyone (especially new users) come up with a weight for what they're submitting.

Maybe it would even be a good idea to have the votes on weights be public, so no one would be tempted to use that as a way of censoring stories.

Maybe restrict users below a certain karma to X number of upvotes per day? That way, you need to consider carefully which stories you upvote. Comment upvotes could stay infinite.

Maybe have the HN software go pull the page that is submitted, and assign it a weight based on number of tokens on the page. Obviously you'd remove stop words and HTML tags.

This would assign lower weights to shorter fluff, and lower weights to articles that are split up over a lot of pages (which in my experience tend to be fluff too, with a 4:1 ad to content ratio). It'd be kind of like Bayesian filtering for post importance.

This was actually one of my ideas for submitting to YC, but I rather like HN, so maybe you could experiment with it here.

Yes, both of those seem excellent. Could we give it a try and see how it turns out? You could define the acceleration of a downvote as (exp (- (* numdownvotes 0.5))) or some such, to discourage cabal behavior.

An ideal solution, although I'm not saying it's easy to get it right, would be to measure the weight of the story based on what portion of clicks are long term clicks, i.e., clicks after which people spend considerable amount of time (presumably reading the article) before coming back to perusing other stories on news.yc.

What if you did a word count of the linked article, and used that for the weight? It might be good to strip out links from the count, but other than that it seems a pretty sold way of judging complexity.

What if the downvote only appears if the story is above, say, 7 karma? This would limit how long a lightweight story could be high on the frontpage.

Karma is variable, no? As the site gets more traffic, karma points will start to go up over the board. A rising tide lifts all boats, so to speak. 7 may be a good threshold now, but will it be in 6 months?

Probably not, but it's the kind of thing that could be manually or algorithmically adjusted.

How about, simply, "only the top five stories can be downvoted?"

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