IMHO the net effect is detrimental to the community. Points should not be awarded by clicking on an article or at least should be taken away by the community somehow in case of click bait.
The way the system is now encourages the creation of almost empty blog posts basically just linking to the actual interesting news just to attract more clicks. It does not promote the interesting news to the top of the page, which is the purpose of the system. Editorializing will occur be it here or outside, in said blog posts.
At the end of the day what matters is that it's really hard to judge a article based on just one line of text and past experience with the source; using this judgement to rank with high influence is an error. The implementation here is well balanced, but not perfect.
As suggestions I would like to leave these:
Greater importance to upvotes, especially on new stories;
Make votes reflect toward the user's karma, encouraging active participation on the ranking;
Evaluate votes relatively, both for stories' ranking and users' karma, taking into account if the user votes a lot, how critical he is of articles, how his votes correlate with the reading interests of the rest of the population(but be careful not to drive away different opinions), etc.;
Measure time between interactions with HN to know how much time was likely spent on the article;
Make better use of the workforce reading the "new" page by showing them personalized pages with what they haven't seen yet
The way the system is now encourages the creation of almost empty blog posts basically just linking to the actual interesting news just to attract more clicks. It does not promote the interesting news to the top of the page, which is the purpose of the system. Editorializing will occur be it here or outside, in said blog posts.
At the end of the day what matters is that it's really hard to judge a article based on just one line of text and past experience with the source; using this judgement to rank with high influence is an error. The implementation here is well balanced, but not perfect.
As suggestions I would like to leave these:
Greater importance to upvotes, especially on new stories;
Make votes reflect toward the user's karma, encouraging active participation on the ranking;
Evaluate votes relatively, both for stories' ranking and users' karma, taking into account if the user votes a lot, how critical he is of articles, how his votes correlate with the reading interests of the rest of the population(but be careful not to drive away different opinions), etc.;
Measure time between interactions with HN to know how much time was likely spent on the article;
Make better use of the workforce reading the "new" page by showing them personalized pages with what they haven't seen yet