A more intelligent use of nofollow

Back in February I posted a rather rambling diatribe on the use of rel=’nofollow’ by various websites. I complained that the social news sites like Slashdot were misusing it or being inconsistent, and really it was a wasted resource. Jeff Wang’s noticed that Paul Graham’s Hacker News (it’s a submit-and-vote based news site like Reddit but more specialised towards the tech startup audience) is making a smarter use of it. Simply, stories get nofollowed until they’ve got more than 5 votes, and then they’re let free. It’s a simple heuristic that hopefully gives the best of both worlds: rewarding good links, but still discouraging high volume/low quality/smells like canned ham links.