While I agree with the overall sentiment, it is like optimizing a program. You profile the program and see that foo (lets relate this to the expired link problem) takes 5% of the cpu and bar (the upvoting problem) which takes 50% of the cpu. Naturally, youd want to optimize bar. However, if it takes 50 hours to optimize bar and 1 to optimize foo you're better off going with foo. This too is said with the caveat that 5% better is worthwhile: nobody cares if a 1 second operation is shortened to 950 milliseconds whereas shortened to .5 seconds is something more noteworthy.