Let's do this: you vote for the posts you like, I'll vote for the articles I like, and we'll let the YC News ranking engine push the posts neither of us like off the front page.

There's aboslutely no need to tell people not to post stuff, unless you think that posts like Atwood's will get votes.

Personally my treshold to upvote a story is pretty high, and to pseudo-downvote an article I don't feel has its place I'd need to lower my standards and upvote a lot of stories I don't like that much, but the system would think all those stories I upvoted have equal importance to me while this is not the case.

Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles.

Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather).

I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?

Don't forget you also have a meta-vote: you choose which sites to patronize. When and if the posts on the front page no longer match your interests, it's time to walk away and let the tragedy of the commons play out the third act.

I agree that it is very annoying not to be able to hide comments. I hope there is some incredibly important reason for this. Maybe it is explicitly to foster the kind of comment you made, to goad people into taking action when the quality of articles drops rather than tolerating dreck and linkbait by ignoring it?