[gmiller123456]

I think this is what most social news sites get wrong about their points systems. Someone who submits an article gets points for each vote it gets. But the few heroes that waded through the submissions to initially upvote them get nothing. Even though they likely did a lot more work than the submitter.

I'd think a better algorithm would be that if you upvote an article in the "new" section that eventually makes it to the main page, you'd get at least as many points as the submitter.

[smitop]

That incentivize upvoting everything, since there is no punishment for upvoting posts that don't make it to the frontpage. That could be solved by making votes a limited resource, but that approach has many downsides.