No, what he is saying is that the system that worked for a small community of like minded individuals does not work for a large diverse community.

The upvote system used to work because it consisted of a lot of similar people saying, this is a good point, or I like this.

Today's community is much more diverse, which is inevitable when you have a quality service/product/community/yadda yadda.

>> In total, Hacker News now sees about 90,000 unique visitors per day. http://newsgrange.com/ycombinators-hacker-news-reaches-1-mil...

The old system just doesn't mean what it used to. People are looking for new strats to preserve the original culture as best they can.

I don't really disagree with your premises, but please explain how removing upvotes fixed the problem.

I could see it going a couple of different ways.

1) It actually has improved comment rankings.

2) or I am just experiencing a placebo affect.

- 1: If it actually fixed the problem, this would mean that quality comments will appear higher on the page, not cluttered by mediocre comments that enjoy the group bump. I pull this assumption based upon the way I use the upvote system. So of course, I could be wrong.

- 2: Maybe the site just feels better to me, because I don't have to see comments get high upvotes that I believe are poorly thought out, or based highly on emotion/fanboyism/or other non logical motivations.

I could see it going either way, but my money is on the first possibility.

All I know for sure is that I now rarely find myself thinking.."Whaat? People think that was a good comment? People thought that added value? People think this guy knows what he's talking about?"

I think it has made the problem worse, sharply worse.

It's just not as self-selecting as it used to be. What worked for the community in the past doesn't necessarily work now or going forward. At least a bit of regression to the mean in the community is inevitable if it grows (which it has, by a lot).