&gt; &quot;The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive.&quot;<p>&gt; &quot;Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago.&quot;<p>Upvotes&#x2F;downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata?<p>&gt; &quot;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.&quot;<p>I&#x27;d suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It&#x27;s easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it&#x27;d definitely add to the overall HN experience.