Will there ever be the ability to upvote a story without it going into your "Saved stories" section? 99% of the time I upvote a story it's because I want to save it for future reference. I'd like the ability to upvote (and downvote) stories based on whether they're HN-worthy without it impacting the "Saved stories" section.
Yeah, I'd also love to see a separate "save" feature and split out "upvote" from "save". I upvote a lot of stories just to put them in the "read this later" list (which is how I view "saved stories") when I might not other upvote them and give them an explicit endorsement.
"I think this is worth reading" seems like a high enough bar for endorsement. I guess it is at least a higher bar than is used for many of the votes for stories that already end up on the front page.
Controversial topics create a problem. People should be reading more than one viewpoint on them. But submitting multiple stories creates duplication issues. A 'save' function would allow people to increase access to information without promoting the visibility of the topic on the front page.
This is the kind of thing we might do if enough people really want it. On the other hand, HN's minimalism is one of its strengths and we don't want to mess with that. So new features have to sing for their supper.
This could be implemented minimally and cleanly by having a "save" link appear once you click into the comments for that story, much like how "flag" appears for individual comments. Upvote would +1 the submission and not save it. Clicking "save" would save the submission and not +1 it.
This would let users indicate "This was a very worthwhile story for HN, but I have no desire to read it again" (upvote) or "I'd like to read this later, but I'm not sure it's HN worthy" (save)... or save and upvote. The placement of the "save" link only once you click through to the comments keeps the home page as it was and only introduces one discreet new option.
