Two HN Announcements

I can't help but like the spirit of the vouch system, and I'm sure quite a bit of thought went into it. But at the same time I'm wondering if the site really needs two different versions of up-vote/down-vote with different different semantics.

Still, I get it, it's a kind of super-vote, reserved for people with a little karma (i.e. some "skin in the game"). Out of curiosity, how'd you guys arrive at 30 for cutoff?

30 is the flag threshold and has been for years. I don't know how pg picked it. It works well, though, and we like that it isn't a high bar.

You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.

The main problem is that upvotes and downvotes are devalued because they are essentially unlimited. What if karma behaved more as a currency and the costs increased as you used it repeatedly in the same comment thread. First one is free, then it costs you 1, then 5, etc.

Variations of this have been suggested many times. I'd be curious to try it someday if we could figure out a way to do it that didn't put anything important at risk.

It would make me less likely to upvote more than one comment per thread. That seems like a downside - a good thread can have several comments worthy of upvotes.