2. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself, then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy voting is the sole purpose of the follow graph, eg. "I want to vote the same way tptacek, cperciva and pg do".
Perhaps publish a leaderboard of top followed people and their voting history to try and avoid a Digg situation.
Perhaps limit the number of people one person can follow. This would help with performance as well.
Perhaps the number of proxy votes would need to affect the score of a comment or submission logarithmically instead of linearly.
Edit: there may need to be a minimum level of karma needed to proxy vote to avoid sockpuppets. Perhaps limit it to active accounts, too.
The problem is that popularity is not indicative of quality.
Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments.
Only instead of having "direct democracy" ("rule of the mob"), you propose a "representative democracy" ("rule of the elites").
While there's something to be said for the "representative democracy" approach (namely, that at least the elites are familiar with the community's norms and mores, unlike some random newbie) they are just as susceptible to making poor decisions as the mob is.
In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good decisions.
Doesn't this apply to every voting system ever designed? If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place? Without voting, what will be left of HN?
> Your proposal is just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments.
Again: isn't that what we have right now?
I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it. I perceive that part of the problem is that the exceptional people who made HN what it is in the early days now have little say compared to the newbie masses who are dragging it down. The people in the middle (eg. myself) are a big number who increasingly become disenfranchised and are less active, thus voting less, thus exacerbating the problem.
> In other words, just because some guy is popular does not mean he makes good decisions.
Here, the "follow" list would be private and only specifically there for you to nominate who you think make good decisions. This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice.
I don't see how you can separate popularity as you do. Why would I have a popular person in my list if I didn't trust their decisions? He could still be popular, just not in my list! Perhaps I should have called it a "proxy vote list" instead of a "follow list".
A user who is in the list of many other users need not even be told who or how many there are (the upvote total may need to be delayed or something like that to achieve this). People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity.