[makeramen]

Agree completely.

If you think about it, "harder to consume quickly," as annoying as it is, is exactly what was needed to fix "the decline of HN." It helps filter out the linkporn because the people who participate are the ones who stay to enjoy the whole experience.

I'm finally finding more links on the front page that lead to lengthy articles I actually want to bookmark on instapaper and read later.

[Evgeny]

If you think about it, "harder to consume quickly," as annoying as it is, is exactly what was needed to fix "the decline of HN."

I have to disagree. I used the comment scores exactly for this, to "consume quickly". Well, yes, there's only so much time I can spend on HN and being able to figure out which posts seem to be highly valued was helpful.

Most of the time I would read the discussion of the article before the article itself. Sometimes from the discusson I could see that the article would not interest me. Sometimes the discussion was so thorough that there would be no need to read the article at all.

Now I generally read the top comment and decide on that. It's good, because it saves even more time. It's bad, because I'm most likely missing on a lot of content.

Maybe eventually I'll get to the point when I open HN once in a few days for a few minutes and close again. That will save time, but a lot of interesting content will be missed.

[Luyt]

Could you please explain what you mean with 'linkporn'? WikiPedia doesn't know the term and Google gives only links to porn (which is probably not what you mean).

I can speculate, but I might be wrong. Maybe you mean something like 'liberally littering articles with links' or even 'linking to one's own blog, even when the link is irrelevant'?

[makeramen]

I was thinking more like what you would see on Reddit, a lot of temporarily attractive/gratifying links that hold little long-term value. Great for attracting the masses and short-term traffic, but the exact reason people have been leaving this site in droves.

Also, a lot of people on Reddit blatantly talk about their intent to farm more karma with their posts.

Not that I have anything against reddit - I do frequent the site - but when I come to HN, the type of content I'm looking for is quite different than when I go to reddit.

[samengland]

And I think that's exactly the reason points shouldn't really be shown...