It’d be nice if we could downvote links as well.

There's just too many new accounts here these days. If you visit /new you'll see there's a new submission every minute. That's ~1200 a day, if you figure in periodic lulls. Most of these accounts comment a few times and then leave. There should be a week's timeout for every new account, they can comment but not submit. And they can't vote (upvote) until the account's a month old. That would really take care of all the spam and give people a chance to lurk long enough to understand the culture.