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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Why not crowd source it and add a down vote arrow for submissions? We could even disable the ability to submit for people with karma below X.

Edit: Not sure why this is getting down voted, I proposed the exact same thing a few days ago and got 4 up votes (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853851).

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The down votes may be because there has been some discussion of the idea, with pg coming down against it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507970

> "The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners."

That was written almost two years ago, though. Does anybody know if there has been a more recent discussion?

Thanks for the clarification. I'm somewhat surprised though that people use the down vote when they disagree with something quite subjective. I usually down vote comments when they are factually wrong or out of place.

From what I've seen in the last 6 months, a lame submission just gets quickly overlooked and lost in the new ones that are coming. Now there might be good ones which roll of the page due to the flood of submissions, but many HN users RSS and read them anyways. Hence it seems to be working.

But I agree, more fluff coming in.

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