Can be performed simultaneously, but it is fairly common belief from psychology (mostly from Skinner) that positive reinforcement is better than punishment when it comes to altering behavior.
Sure. I totally get that and think it's a great area for future exploration.
A couple of points though:
1) You are not technically giving any reinforcement, because the agent in question (i.e., the user) does not perceive any change in the environment.
2) The possible pageviews that HN can drive may offer sufficiently positive reinforcement for people to continue violating the site by creating link-bait articles.
3) Honeypots are merely a fail-safe to prevent degradation. In a healthy community, one would expect that very few people would ever actually have a sufficiently low h-ratio as to be ignored.
