If HN were more popular, would you bother voting on submissions?
Your vote here currently yields a lot of power and I suspect that this is part of the appeal to HN.<p>BTW, voting power could be reduced to enhance the quality of what gets to the front page by encouraging more people to vote on new submissions as reddit does.  Namely, reddit shows a new submission at the top of the list on the front page to encourage more people to vote on it.