[borgia]

There seems to be some demand here to warp HN into some bastardized version of Reddit?

The vast majority of submissions that hit the front page cannot be explicitly linked to one company, or a product, which would indicate that the vast majority of that which is on the front page is there because users liked the content and upvoted it.

If some parties are occasionally abusing the system to promote their own content then I don't think the answer lies in a dramatic overhaul to everything including throwing in flair pieces to submissions and giving people special accounts.

Perhaps a solution would be to disable the upvote button until a user had a certain amount of karma points, as is done with the downvote button? Or maybe add weighting to upvotes based on the amount of karma points a user already has? Or maybe monitor submissions for actual link clicks and use that as a weighting i.e. to prevent people upvoting content they themselves haven't even looked at?

All of that is game-able, of course, but not without significantly more effort than is currently required, and the abuse of the current system appears to be infrequent as it is.

I don't think HN needs any radical changes.