I think jacquesm makes a really good point in his article (thanks for that link!). In the article, he explains how some incentives within HN are resulting in negative side-effects:

> the race to post my stuff in order to harvest the associated karma got a little out of hand

Points/upvotes on articles should not be allocated to the user who submits that article (unless perhaps, it's an "Ask HN" submission); points/upvotes should be allocated to users only on the comments they make. I agree with Jacques that this would improve the level of discourse on HN and also remove down-vote capability from those who have not earned it through quality comments.

There are a number of ways to make this change: (i) points received from article submissions could be retroactively eliminated from a users score (ii) or separated out from points received on comments--possibly an interesting new data point, (iii) or the points could simply be associated with the root URL of the content source and then displayed on a new page as a list of "Top Ranked Content Sources"--this might also encourage less duplicates and an effort to find the best source before submitting a story... (iv) or maybe this is all just wishful thinking?

edit: here is the associated HN discussion for that article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443