The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong

The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners.

> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

Honest question, and I do not mean this as a flame, because generally I quite enjoy Hacker News.

How, exactly, is the current top-rated story on HN, "How to Stop the Drug Wars" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507509 ) related to.. news of hacking?

Hacker News isn't so much just about programming, but things that are interesting to programmers. It's entirely possible that the programmers that visit HN are interested in that topic.

It's a valid point, though. At what point is the line drawn? Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way?

Editor control should be used to put a stop to that, IMO. Democracy is great, but it went too far with Reddit. HN would become much less useful to me if it went in that direction.