It would be healthy for submitters to look at headlines before they copy them directly, realizing that what makes sense for a blogger (aware of Digg) seeking some well-deserved attention for a post might not make sense in an extremely specialized forum like Hacker News.

What I mean is, a blogger is completely justified in naming a post "Why James Bond would never drink a Coke" (like I did for an environmentalist blog) if that blogger believed their purpose would be best served by alerting Digg users to the perfidies of the Coca-Cola company. But if a Hacker News reader appreciated the post's message -- that Coca-Cola is exploiting water rights laws in third-world countries to produce its products cheaply at the expense of the residents and their clean water supplies -- they would do well to use a different headline that what the desperate blogger, often paid by the pageview, had written with a view to Digg.

That said, bloggers will more and more overhype their posts in the way that media have since their beginning, and those of us on small thinky web sites will have to get used to downvoting and moving on.

Except we can't downvote can we? at least not stories? (or is there a karma level for that?) (I am sure I am missing something obvious).

Nobody can downvote stories, but if they're violating the rules, high-karma users can flag them for deletion.

I would be cool with allowing high karma users the ability to down vote stories (people on the top 100 list for example).

I used to really want downvoting. Flagging really works much better. The stories that I would have ended up downvoting either don't belong here and get [dead]-ed, or they spawn a lot of fascinating conversation.

Fortunately, people haven't been doing a lot of gaming of the system yet. The biggest problem with upvoting only is that controversial posts garner the most votes (a thousand people love a subject and ten thousand people HATE it, so it gets a thousand upvotes and a TON of comments, even if most people disagree with the premise).

I agree, downvotes are dangerous. I know Reddit had (has? I don't know I left when I found HN) a problem where all new articles were getting downmodded by people who wanted their own links on the front page.

I repeatedly think that I would like downvotes, but I quite quickly remember that I absolutely hate downvotes. I don't completely agree with being able to downmod comments, however I think the side effects are dampened that you have to have good karma before you can downvote, which prevents trolls from abusing the system.