31–40 of 172 posts
Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.
A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers? Hmm ... interesting ... ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day. This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.
And maybe having a (daily?) article submission limit per user at the same time would keep people from submitting articles just for the sake of it.
It crossed my mind allowing users with more karma to have higher submission limits, but that might aswel be gamed at some point by some users.
So perhaps the best thing is having a CAPTCHA to avoid bot submissions and some kind of limit to avoid manual spamming.
Truth is, HN article quality has been slowly declining in the last few months and we keep seeing the same sources over and over again on the front page.
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…
Maybe its about time HN had a CAPTCHA on their submit form.
A CAPTCHA? In a forum for Hackers? Hmm ... interesting ... ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day. This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…
FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission syst…
(Of course, lately, I get the vast majority of my interesting reading from here anyway, but still...)
I don't blame you for bot-submitting Jacques' stuff. His posts are always good and - after all - always hit first page at a dead run. People here do actually find them interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.
Maybe so. Or maybe it just represents "points" -- little cookies -- for the user. You can never have too many cookies. I don't know. That's why I suggested the experiment. I think the idea that it represents peer acclaim is not very useful, at least to me. I've heard other high karma folks say (and I agree) that probably more than anything it just represents spending too much time online.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity. Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem. I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree. Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...
Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of wh…
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention…
Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)
Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.