>Minimalism and simplicity work well for HN, and I don't think there'd be a clear enough benefit here to warrant the added complexity and occasional annoyance to legitimate users.
HN is less simple than you think: you can't vote or make polls until you have a certain level of karma; you may be hellbanned; you can't downvote responses to your comments; comment karma is displayed as the number (max -4, real-karma), but still calculated below that; there's a delay -- not a constant delay, but exponential based on the nesting length -- of time after a comment is posted before any replies can be made. HN is complicated; it just doesn't make it obvious to the user. Going along with other design choices that have been made, pg might implement this by simply dropping votes that are made without loading the page; the user would never even know this happened. It wouldn't make the complexity on the user any greater.
And yes, spambots or human spambots can click the link first: it is trivial. But -- assuming this is a problem; I don't know that -- if some don't know about it, their votes wouldn't count. Problems don't have to be solved in one step; lessening them is useful.
Good point. I was stuck imagining a clumsy "You must read the article before voting" page rather than pg's silent vote dropping trick. The former would hurt the perceived simplicity of the site, while the current uses of the latter work well enough that I usually forget it's even there.
It'd be interesting to see the actual stats on this - what percentage of story votes are made before clicking the link, and do some outliers (spam, or sensationalist titles) get a large enough fraction of pre-read upvotes to justify taking some sort of action? I've assumed that it's low enough to not make much difference, but I could be wildly mistaken.
HN is less simple than you think: you can't vote or make polls until you have a certain level of karma; you may be hellbanned; you can't downvote responses to your comments; comment karma is displayed as the number (max -4, real-karma), but still calculated below that; there's a delay -- not a constant delay, but exponential based on the nesting length -- of time after a comment is posted before any replies can be made. HN is complicated; it just doesn't make it obvious to the user. Going along with other design choices that have been made, pg might implement this by simply dropping votes that are made without loading the page; the user would never even know this happened. It wouldn't make the complexity on the user any greater.
And yes, spambots or human spambots can click the link first: it is trivial. But -- assuming this is a problem; I don't know that -- if some don't know about it, their votes wouldn't count. Problems don't have to be solved in one step; lessening them is useful.