|
|
|
|
|
|
by gdl
5673 days ago
|
|
|
The problem is that the proposed solution is more of a mild nuisance than a solid block. If spambots or the human equivilant want to upvote worthless links, it's trivial to hit the link first. The same minor workaround would be required of legitimate users that, as you mention, may have seen the article elsewhere and already read it. And it might make impulsive people more likely to read the article before voting, but again nothing is guaranteed (and is that really a serious problem anyway?) Minimalism and simplicity work well for HN, and I don't think there'd be a clear enough benefit here to warrant the added complexity and occasional annoyance to legitimate users. |
|
|
HN is less simple than you think: you can't vote or make polls until you have a certain level of karma; you may be hellbanned; you can't downvote responses to your comments; comment karma is displayed as the number (max -4, real-karma), but still calculated below that; there's a delay -- not a constant delay, but exponential based on the nesting length -- of time after a comment is posted before any replies can be made. HN is complicated; it just doesn't make it obvious to the user. Going along with other design choices that have been made, pg might implement this by simply dropping votes that are made without loading the page; the user would never even know this happened. It wouldn't make the complexity on the user any greater.
And yes, spambots or human spambots can click the link first: it is trivial. But -- assuming this is a problem; I don't know that -- if some don't know about it, their votes wouldn't count. Problems don't have to be solved in one step; lessening them is useful.