Along the same lines, I think that part of the problem is that there's inflation in upvotes because people have an unlimited supply.

I don't upvote that often. When I do, I really mean it because the content is that good.

I'm sure that there are others who have a much lower bar for submitting an upvote. After all, an upvote costs nothing.

Why shouldn't upvotes from people who are active but upvote rarely count more than those who upvote a lot? How about some of the outstanding long time users with tons of karma: why don't their upvotes count for much more than a newbie upvoting a linkbait article or a reddit-style joke thread?

All upvotes are not equal.

I think this is one of the underlying problems with many social moderation systems, HN included.

Your idea of having upvotes cost karma is an example of one of the possible solutions that economics has devised for us.

"I think that part of the problem is that there's inflation in upvotes because people have an unlimited supply."

It's not obvious to me that this is true. Here is a counterexample:

In the extreme case, if the user base consisted of a set of 'wise old users' who only up voted the 'good' content and a set of 'mindless new users' who literally up voted every post, then the votes from the latter group just add to the baseline vote count without having any power at changing the orderings of submissions. In this situation the submission ranking is determined solely by the 'wise old users' even if they are greatly outnumbered.

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The problem you describe is that the new people are interested in different things to the old and can use their number advantage to push things in that direction.

It seems to me that there are a few possible solutions.

1. a) Restrict the topics of discussion on the website by restricting the people who can add to the conversation. Eg, disallowing new accounts to be created or starting a new website and only selectively inviting people.

1. b) Restricting the topics of discussion on the website by empowering a certain subgroup of people who share a particular interest. This could be done by moderators deleting submissions or via your suggestion of having 'super votes'.

2. a) Allow free submission of topics but provide manual mechanisms for organising the information better so people can choose the subset that they are interested in. Eg, the subreddit approach or having comments marked as insightful/funny/etc.

2. b) Allow free submission of topics but provide personalised rankings tailored to each user. Eg, user rlpb tends to like posts which RiderOfGiraffes likes and also posts which include the word "thinking" so give those a bonus in the rlpb ranking.

In my opinion the ideal solution is 2.b. I dislike the 'elitist' philosophy of 1.a and b, they seem unworkable as long term solutions and pragmatically if I can find the information useful to me on pages 1 and 2 I don't care if pages 3-100 are junk.

Option 2.a seems to work ok on Reddit. However, it does rely on people playing by the rules and probably also a willingness to subdivide subdivisions quite liberally.

I'm sure there are problems with 2.b as well: people need to be actively providing information about their interests to get the classification benefit, and the computational load is likely higher.

tldr: The premise of any vote based ranking site is that there is one set of universally accepted 'good content.' The success of this mechanism depends crucially on the homogeneity of the population it is applied to. If this assumption is broken it can be re-established by exiling part of the population or segregating the population into more homogeneous subgroups (explicitly or invisibly.)

I think downvoting isn't as easy as you think for a newbie. I only see a downvote button occasionally, and have to go into a individual comment link to flag it, and I have been here for a fair amount of time.

There is a karma threshold you have to be above in order to downvote. AFAIK, it's a fixed number. One suggestion I have seen (and made) is to make the threshold a function of the total karma on HN, effectively making it harder to downvote and effectively punishing non-participation in discussion by the removal of downvoting rights.

Interesting that after commenting my down vote arrows reappeared...

The downvote karma threshold is 500, and it looks like you just passed it (perhaps for a second time?).

Newbies can't downvote. There's a karma hurdle to clear before you can downvote, over 200 - I've heard it scales so only the top n users can do so.

I got the ability recently at 500.

I have 420 karma, and I don't have the option to downvote, and I've been on HN for a while.

I looked this up recently, and it looks like it was bumped from 200 to 500 in the last year or so.

I should've written "somewhere over 200," just speaking from my experience.

I think there should be a different system, where Karma is "invested" in the posts you make, and you lose maybe 5 Kara when you post but if 6 people upvote it, you will gain that one Karma and the user would choose how much Karma to invest, and the more Karma invested the higher it appears on the page. There would need to be a slightly higher starting Karma though, but it would be interesting to see how and if it works out.

I think the best solution would be to make HN invite-only.

If it had been invite only I would never have been able to join HN or make the contributions that I have (minor though they may be). I just don't run in the same circles and don't have some other web presence (a blog for example) that might serve as credentials. Invite-only would put a real hard-limit on growth.

Is growth the key problem or is it something slightly different?

I'm afraid that making HN invite-only would just create a more insular community, prone to inside jokes, self-referential memes, and an "us vs. them" mentality.

What about invite only with periods in which the site was opened to new members?