Looks like you've got some easy karma, I guess
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#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
People care about their HN karma - I don't know if it's 1% of people or 99% of people (maybe a poll is needed for that) - but certainly some people do. And because of that, "cheap ways to get a bit of karma" matter, because by their definition they are acts of people who are valuing karmic return over quality of submission, resulting in low-quality discussions that appeal to our lowest common denominators, not to our…
100% of active participants care about not getting negative karma on comments. This is good actually, because rude or completely pointless comments are severely downvoted, this being the punishment instrument that the community has for people that break the guidelines.
I semi-agree with you... but only semi.
Personally I would generally care about being downvoted because generally I don't comment anything that I would expect to be downvoted, and therefore if it does it annoys me to know that either I was wrong in my judgement of what I said, or that the downvoter was wrong in how they read it (or that the downvoter is just an asshole - the ultimate conclusion I always come to when wondering why somebody downvoted me!)
But I'd never care about it as more of a signal of how a comment was received... if I felt there was a valid reason for me to reply with a one-word comment to somebody simply saying "Cunt." then knowing that I would be downvoted wouldn't come into it.
So far I don't think I've ever written that comment on HN, but I have written a few that I expected to get quite a few downvotes for - often accurate expectations, occasionally completely wrong. And as long as I know that they're downvoting for the reasons I expected, not that I've said something I wish I hadn't, I'm fine with that.
Re: undefined
#43There are two different questions being asked here.
Is the number of polls getting out of hand? ... to me that's a no, they give a glimpse of the HN community which I find interesting
Are the polls a cheap way to get some karma? ... to me this is "quite possible" and I often wonder if the poll would be created in the first place if there was no promise of karma gain
Re: undefined
#44To be honest if the majority of users didn't like the polls they'd never make it to the front page... So I don't really see a problem with them.
That's not honesty. Fact is, a tiny click-happy minority can put anything on the front page, and the majority cannot down vote it.
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#45The rudimentary nature of poll system on this site cheapens the experience somewhat. I love the community here, but this site is fairly archaic in construction.
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#46If anything, I think it just highlights the need to separate submission and comment karma or do away with submission karma entirely. (Good) comments add to the conversation. Submitting is just pasting a link.
It's come up on HN before that popular blogs have bots running against them that post new articles to HN as soon as they appear on the RSS feed. I don't really care about the karma side of this but it encourages behaviour in some that just adds noise to HN (IMHO).
As for the polls, there have been a lot these last few days. Not excessively so but we might want to lay off for a few days. Some of the comments have been interesting. The results of the polls themselves are completely meaningless.
EDIT: to clarify, voluntary polls are meaningless. Properly conducted polls with random sampling are of course an effective tool. Of course, none of the HN polls fall into this category (hence "meaningless" in terms of results).
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#47If anything, I think it just highlights the need to separate submission and comment karma or do away with submission karma entirely. (Good) comments add to the conversation. Submitting is just pasting a link. It's come up on HN before that popular blogs have bots running against them that post new articles to HN as soon as they appear on the RSS feed. I don't really care about the karma side of this but it encourages…
I was pretty surprised to learn that the HN crowd prefer OS X, but yes internet polls (and really, all polls) can't be taken seriously. There has been a small influx lately.
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#48I don't have a problem with polls, per se, but the ones coming up lately seem totally pointless. "What kind of OS do you use" is most often the opener for the Eternal Argument. Plus we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of an already small community, self-selected so those who want to assert that their OS (or whatever) is The Best are much more likely to comment. It might be better phrased "what OS are HN user…
"What kind of OS do you use" is most often the opener for the Eternal Argument. [...] It might be better phrased "what OS are HN users most passionate about?"
Actually, I think this poll gave a much more balanced view of OS distribution on HN than the comments I read here all the day. It takes much more passion to write a comment "I am using $OS because..." than to vote for one's OS in such a poll. For example, I was a little bit surprised about how many HN users actually use Windows as their primary OS, given that Windows tips and tools rarely show up on the frontpage.
So, in my opinion, polls are useful in getting a more objective view of HN interests than one can get from submissions and comments.
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#49If anything, I think it just highlights the need to separate submission and comment karma or do away with submission karma entirely. (Good) comments add to the conversation. Submitting is just pasting a link. It's come up on HN before that popular blogs have bots running against them that post new articles to HN as soon as they appear on the RSS feed. I don't really care about the karma side of this but it encourages…
I was pretty surprised to learn that the HN crowd prefer OS X, but yes internet polls (and really, all polls) can't be taken seriously. There has been a small influx lately.
This poll seems to indicate that it's an even split between OS X and Linux:
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#50I think that people are just creating polls to increase their karma