The best reason is because downvotes piss people off. They have been the cause of more flamewars on reddit than anything else. When you know you are right but everyone is downvoting you and upvoting the "wrong" guy, I know very few people who won't react aggressively.

+1 (Insightful)

This is why democracy + free speech (in theory, at least) works. No matter how unpopular, a voice cannot be silenced. If you don't like a person's viewpoints, you can't shut them down by downvoting them; you can only upvote the viewpoint you do like, and / or present your own position yourself, if no one else has done it.

The entire up vote/down vote thing needs to go away. Voting on a story should be related to an action that the user is taking which implies an up/down vote.

For example, in my Facebook application Wildfire stories are up voted only if you pass then on to your friends. As you mentioned to me yesterday, delicious/popular is interesting because it's based on pages people bookmarked for themselves.

John.

I think the hardest part is finding what behavior to track. Click-through is obviously bad. Bookmarking and passing to friends will also slant the stories in a way that isn't necessarily good. I have a lot of friends that don't really care about hacker news, and tend to bookmark more reference-type material.

Comments are useful, but that slants towards controversial topics.

Simple idea someone might want to found something on: provide a little highlighter extension for browsers/in a wraparound frame/as a bookmarklet. Track pages people highlight; title and describe them as the few most highlighted words.

Not sure if I'm the exception to the rule, but I definitely highlight random crap while I read a page (just something for my mouse hand to do)... so I'd ruin your stats in a mean way.

I do the same. Mostly as a way to quickly find where I was reading after a distraction.

In a small, smart community like this, an explicit upvote is a hard quality metric to beat.

The problem inevitably becomes what do you do once the community has become larger? How do you keep the topics and the level of discussion from sliding downward? This is an issue that Lambda the Ultimate's been facing for the last couple of years as less academic, more industry people join the community, and they've been handling it fairly well but it's taken a lot of work on everyone's part. Reddit's facing the same issue as well. If there are more dumb people than smart ones in a community, they can dictate what articles make it to the front page and overwhelm the good discussion with drivel.

Could always have a downvote, but weight it as far less than an upvote.

Personally I miss having the option of a downvote. Yes I agree downvotes can be an uninformed reflex, but removing any voice of disagreement seems overly harsh.

I'd say have upvotes that count as 10 points, and downvotes that count as 1 point or something like that.

I disagree, as noted further up the thread. Preventing downvotes doesn't remove the dissenting opinion. In fact, it allows and encourages it. Downvotes allow groupthink to silence disagreement. If you disagree with something, instead of downvoting, post a comment explaining your position.

Likewise if you agree with something--then posts can just be sorted by comment count. Of course, it could be said that the upvote button is just a collapsed and made-convenient form of replying "Me too!"

Wouldn't it be interesting, then, if instead of editing a metadatum, clicking the arrow made a duplicate of the post (or, rather, a Post object with the votee as its prototype), which then stacked under the original...

"'A stacked comment' posted by bob, joe, fred"

So what happens if something stupid or banal gets voted up to the front page. What if it's something that I don't think is relevant or useful.

Should I upvote every other article to express my opinion? :)

People who agree with an article/think it's important/useful have an immediate way to express that in a useful way - an upvote.

You don't have the same capability if you strongly disagree with an article, see it as unimportant, not relevant, or off-topic. I still think that's a shame.

An alternative would be using flags, like reddit's 'report', the idea being you only use them for stuff that is really unsuitable, like spam, trolls and stupid stuff.

That's not a bad idea.

Relatedly, I've submitted quite a few of my blog posts both here and on programming.reddit.com, and they'll often get a good number of points here, but on reddit someone will almost instantly downvote them to zero, and they of course never come back up. So I like News.YC's system.

Do other people find the same thing?

I rarely downvote on something but I think that having that option does no harm. Maybe on reddit downvoters are more likely to be thoughtless, I don't think that is a problem with news.ycombinator readers. It would help a lot to have the same statistics for downvoters on Y combinator.

If you rarely downvote and others allways downvote items they don't like, your opinion is going to be underrepresented. I think that is a harm. As I said elsewhere, downvotes are too ambiguous in meaning.

Won't it be better for ycnews to allow downvotes and silently not count them against a submission but use them for other purposes like measuring thoughtlessness of a user / analyzing the impulse-response of the crowd here etc?

You could make down votes more expensive by forcing someone to type a rationale of why, or, if the dot product of their down vote to the community vote on a post is way off, discard. Finally, maybe have an up vote/down vote bank that can be exhausted for a given time period. Since you have so much free time, anyway.