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"I think the voting problem is a serious one. Apparently, only a minority of readers and posters vote and they seem to have a gang mentality that works like this: "If I don't like you, I'll vote you down regardless of what you write." This sucks the big one."

Maybe fade the commenter's name when a comment is posted and restore it to full visibility, say 24 (or 48 or 100) hours later? This way you are forced to focus on the content of the comment and not the commenter.

I agree, I posted the feature request here not too long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=223238

Amazon has had the problem of bi-modal review distributions for a while (most reviews are either 5 or 1 stars.) They've done some ineffective things to try to change that, like specifically requesting reviews from people. But then, unless people are emotional about a product, why bother?

Skinner: [Looking at political buttons at Cockamamie's] Hmm. These campaign buttons are all partisan. Don’t you have any neutral ones? "May the better man win," "Let's have a good, clean election," that sort of thing?

The best solution would be to do what governments have always done: Limit the amount of votes per person.

>Limit the amount of votes per person.

There are more subtle ways. Raising karma needed for downvote, better as a function of site size. Making downvotes cost you karma. Giving "objetive" scores to certain comments so voting them has an effect on voters' karma. Hiding comments score so you don't get influenced by others' votes. Delaying application of karma so you have to behave instead of probing how to game the system.

One thing that I've seen that doesn't work is to use simplistic algorithms that operate automatically based on karma and agreement. That method results in groupthink and, if the site is popular enough, people gaming the system for profit. Other times it generates two confronted bands. It seems that an external human feedback is needed peridically to inform the system what's undesirable.

Also to give modding quotas, so one only receives a fixed number of mod points that can be applied before having to wait to receive more. That would make each user have a similar impact on the board, whereby an upper limit is placed to curtail people from going on an unthinking modding binge.

That creates a strong bias for people with lots of time on their hands which I reckon tips the voting bias towards people not actually running a startup.

I don't understand. What exactly does create strong bias?

Karma isn't a function of usefulness to the community, it's a function of time spent on the site, broadly speaking. As such, I suspect that those that have the most experience with startups on average tend to be below the mean in the karma pool. Thus giving those with the most karma an additional boost in shaping the site dynamics would push the site further in the direction of "fans of startups" as opposed to "people working on startups".

I kind of wonder if PG/YC would reject the top karma people out of hand as time wasters:-)

Or fans of PG. Anything he posts automatically gets double digits of upvotes in minutes.

Aren't most people here fans of his to some degree? I mean, I don't accept his writing as The Word of Landru, but I thought most people found the site due to his writings and linking to it?

Agreed, I do my part to try and vote on stuff as much as I can, especially comments that have obviously taken time and effort to create.