Hacker News Reader

I think users are right to worry. I worry. There's a kind of gravity that seems to pull down news aggregators. It's all too clear what happens; lightweight and/or politically charged stuff is easy to vote up, because it requires little thought.

I'm hoping weighted voting will solve this, but I don't take it for granted.

I'm not too sure that it's because of the ease of voting. That's obviously part of it, but I think that as religious/political extremism rises, the propensity to vote also rises. So you tend to get extremists voting more often than "average" people who don't care enough one way or the other. And there is no good way to get around this-- it's a problem that has been around since Athens and mathematically weighing things probably wont do a lot of good.

This is why Ron Paul is mentioned in every reddit/digg thread.

>there is no good way to get around this

An authoritarian can minimize the influence of the extremists or other people that vote in a way contrary to the well-being of the community.

There's one at #9 right now actually! :-)

Thing is, daily xkcd threads I can handle, daily atheist rants, Ron Paul campaigns and lolcat crap I can't.

Thank you.