It'll grow regardless. And, the kind of people that will actually stick around tend to be the kind of people we want to be here. The rest will wander off...back to digg, over to reddit, whatever.
Thanks for asking, though.
Now it's pg's job to figure out how to programmatically maintain the high quality of results. I still want one down-vote per week for stories...sometimes a story shows up that makes me feel ill to see it on the front page, and it would feel real good to vote them down, even if I only got to do it once per week(day|month).
I like the idea of a karma hurdle to vote on articles, but not to post comments. Since fewer people tend to comment than visit, this will allow a small number of people to act as effective gatekeepers.
I also like the idea of forcing people to solve a riddle or make a simple program in order to sign up. This can be gained, but your average Joe stupid person won’t bother.
I wouldn't like that one bit. I know a fair bit about technology, but when it comes to most here I probably know diddly squat when it comes to programming. I'm a reddit refugee who finds quite a bit of the articles here interesting and is excited to actually see good discussion. Besides, I'm willing to bet there are a fair number of people who could pass any kind of test you set up and still prove to be quite destructive.
Down voting is too easy to abuse. Reddit was being gamed in this way -- certain users were down-voting everything, which made being a new poster starting out an almost automatic karma penalty of a few points. They've made the down-vote penalty milder because of this.
I suppose, but if you only get one...you'd have to have an awful lot of extra accounts to make a big difference. But, if everyone agrees that a story sucks or doesn't fit the purpose of the site, it ought to go away.
Just having a small amount of extra accounts can make a big difference if you can down-vote stories at the very beginning. This gives the unmolested stories a big head-start. I think that reddit implemented different behavior for the first hour of a story's life for this reason.
Only one down-vote a week? If you reduce the frequency like that, then that's just another way of weakening down-voting, which is what reddit seemingly did to their downvotes.
Thanks for asking, though.
Now it's pg's job to figure out how to programmatically maintain the high quality of results. I still want one down-vote per week for stories...sometimes a story shows up that makes me feel ill to see it on the front page, and it would feel real good to vote them down, even if I only got to do it once per week(day|month).