Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people who follow the links yet dont vote even if they like them. An example is the facebook YC news group. It has 42 members yet the story announcing it only has 13 points.

Could this be an example of the 1% rule? http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html

View on HN

I tend to think that it is more the result of a bit of cognitive dissonance, particularly with respect to what the points values mean. They can be viewed either as a metric of popularity, or a metric of quality. Most people {{handwaving}} conceive of points as some mixture of the two, hence there is a reluctance to give a point to a story with, say, 20 points, even if you liked it, because you don't think it is a "21-point quality" story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com