Hacker News Reader

One thing that could be done would be to go back to a -8 points limit for down votes which may reinforce better what are really bad comments. At the moment a comment with an unpopular stance that is decently written can go -4 along with plain stupid comments that would normally get down voted a lot more.

View on HN

Alternatively; a two value system measuring popularity of the sentiment expressed and separately the quality of the post. So for example, a poorly written post with good ideas would be: legibility: -4, popularity: +4. This could be expressed as an rounded average or different users could filter by their own preference of legibility/popularity.

Of course this would all be a fairly major change to a system that isn't really broken so it's just speculative thinking on my part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com