The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it establishes a mindset of &quot;internet points&quot; which encourages grubbing for upvotes, especially on HN where you must either grind out 500 points worth of relatively meaningless comments, or wait until you have the time to post 500 points worth of useful messages, which takes much longer, before you can use downvotes. If your opinions don&#x27;t match the overarching consensus of the community, it may take forever because people downvote those with which they strongly disagree.<p>The goal of user feedback on submissions and comments should be to gain information about the comments in a more nuanced system than the linear &quot;good&#x2F;bad&quot; scale, so that the site can make use of this information to help users achieve their browsing goals. The other problem with up&#x2F;down votes is that they&#x27;re used to decide ordering, i.e. visibility, and everyone wants their comments to be read (that was the motivation for posting them). Thus there&#x27;s a natural incentive to try to grab the screenspace with the most eyeballs. People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other &quot;siblings&quot; in the tree. These are noise votes that provide no insight into any inherent property of the content, but simply fall out of the misaligned incentives. I&#x27;d like to see a system which lets HN answer the following questions: Is a comment well-written but trollbait? Is a comment a simple request for explanation, or a brilliant informative summary of a topic? Is a comment accidentally on the wrong post, or is it someone mistaken about matters of fact? Is a comment political or technical? Is it a first-person account from someone involved in the article? Is it anecdata? Is it an empty &quot;me too&quot;? There are many roles comments can be playing and if you&#x27;re reading HN with a particular goal in mind, sorting user content into these buckets would be very useful.<p>Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The reason HN&#x27;s is so poor is because the incentives are misaligned and pg does not actually care about the quality of discourse here, but merely the quantity and subject of discussion (because HN exists to farm cultural capital for venture capitalists). I do not believe much thought has been put into optimizing HN for the people who read and comment on it.<p>Edit: I can&#x27;t believe this article got flagged and is no longer visible on the HN frontpage. This system is so dysfunctional.