Thanks, good question nf. When mk created Hubski he wanted it to not have the sort of "I want fake internet points" quality that other aggregators have. He eliminated down votes from the get go. When Hubski first started it looked like a blue version of Hacker News with no down votes and with the Hubski logo at the top of the page. The logo is something mk came up with years prior. One night I had a dream that the Predator, from the old movie Predator had a hubwheel on his count-down watch that he uses at the end to blow up. When it counted down, the wheels propagated clock wise on it's device. The next day at dinner with our wives, mk asked me to join him in creating Hubski and I agreed and told him my first idea.... using the hub-wheel as the voting mechanism. That's how it came to be. Welcome to Hubski Grevor and nf!
Worthy of note: psychologically, criticism has five times the weight of praise. In other words, one downvote has the psychological impact of five upvotes. On Reddit they're weighted the same. I suspect upvotes are granted with much higher frequency than downvotes... but it does emphasize the outsized impact of a "disapproval button."
Let's say hypothetically that Hubski grows by a large factor. Wouldn't this system become a huge burden to users as trolls and children start spamming links and memes with no way for other users to "downvote" junk material?
You can Ignore, Mute or Hush a user. Ignore: Their content will never make your feed. You don't have to see their posts. Mute: They will not see your content in their feeds and even if they did, they cannot comment on your posts Hush: Anyone you hush's comments automatically filter to the bottom of any comment feed. What's cool is that this curates your experience with this user. However, in the same feed where you have a user hushed, they may be at the top of someone else's version of that comment thread. There's no doubt that we will continue to have new functions and features etc as we need them, but this is where we find ourselves now. If you stick around, you will find that we are constantly adding new functionality, much of which is suggested directly from the community.
I can see possibly needing to adjust the rate at which points get added, but think about upvotes for a minute. How often are non-obvious spam and meme posts really downvoted on Reddit? Why do you think so many subreddits have gone the self post only route? I think it's an interesting choice to create a rule in a community that discourages posting links on a link aggregation site. I honestly think reddit has grown beyond itself and the scope of what it was designed to do. I still like reddit, and I frequent it a lot. I just think it has a few issues because of its organic growth.
I haven't seen this in any other welcome thread, but when you fill your hubwheel through Internet voodoo algorithms, you get a badge that you can award posts you find particularly good. And one time when I insulted someone I don't like who was being a dick. Badges are default follow for new users I believe, badged comments being more visible in chatter, which is supposed to be the best comments from people you follow. You can badge comments and links. It's reddit gold for free based on your reputation and with almost as many perks. Almost meaning like none