This is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story)

As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.

As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)

This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names and posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.

I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.

Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.