In theory, yes, upvotes indicate valuable content and downvotes indicate irrelevancy. This worked brilliantly for Digg and Reddit, after all, right?
In practice, the people that designed the upvote-downvote system and presented it to us as Web 2.0's way of making the Internet perfectidealolympus forgot that they were dealing with human beings. They assumed they were dealing with computers or something for which there's a such thing as "optimal". As a human being, sometimes I feel like a selfless contributor of optimizing upvotes and downvotes, other times I feel like upvoting because hey I like this guy, other times I feel like downvoting because fuck the world and fuck you buddy, and still other times my Dadaist urges kick in and I vote entirely randomly to sow discord and paranoia among the otherwise content bourgeoise. Or at least that's how I imagine some people vote.
The thing about dealing with vague information like "links" and "comments" is that there is no agreed consensus on what's optimal. Back when I first joined Hacker News two or three years ago, there was a faction of users (myself included for a time) who disagreed with snark replies and witty one-liners. That's almost all gone now; we accept that the community feels the need sometimes to be clever rather than overwhelmingly in-depth. There have been people who complain about HN's start-up news/technical news/YCombinator-related news/breaking news/programming news/obituaries/spammy motivational blog posts that tell you you should be happier than you are/Paul Graham's thoughts on his local deli's chicken salad. None of them are "right" per se; they all simply have a different vision of what they want. If YCombinator wanted to evolve Hacker News, they could attempt to install solutions to this perception problem, and come up with clever alternatives that would help each of us see only the things we want to see. But I'm guessing they're happy with HN as it is, warts and all; I'm also betting that most of us are accepting of HN as it is, or at least we suspect any attempts to fix problems will only make them worse.
So in the end ironically the votes up and down don't matter. Downvoted content is sometimes great. Upvoted content is sometimes really terrible. The lucky thing is that Hacker News is meaningless enough that we won't be shedding tears over its imperfections. Or at least we shouldn't be.
What, it all does not matter? This is all just meaningless words on a computer said by somebody somewhere?
I think that is resignation. Every community needs a culture, forms to pressure others into doing the 'right' things, ways to be able to incorporate others. Once you loosen up and make it free for all this might as well be talking to the lowest denominator.
I don't think it's a bad thing that HN's upvotes/downvotes aren't as good as they could be. Honestly I don't think anybody cares about who has the most points in a given thread. What matters is what people say, and how they interact with one another. While Hacker News has some problems with that sometimes, on the whole it does a damn good job of being a community. Even the irritating things about it are kind of adorable in a way.
When I said it's meaningless, I mean relatively rather than in some nihilistic sense. Obviously, things on this site matter. But if we have a front page on which I'm only interested in 5 or so posts at a time because I think the rest are silly, that's not too bad if other people are looking at those other posts. I'm not going to get too pissed off at the sensationalism and the dumb stuff. That's just the way this site is. Trying too hard to change that might ruin all the things that I like.
HN is not particularly Serious Business, you know? It's a fun site with some great commenters, but it's not like MetaFilter where the culture is so unique and good that I'd get upset if it started deteriorating. Or like the old threads I read on Slashdot or Usenet where I realize there was such a good thing once but now it's gone into decline. HN has always had these community guidelines that nobody follows, and its successes have been despite that. If that makes sense.
