A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
1–10 of 286 posts
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#2I don't care about (HN) karma, and i believe (a.k.a. untested hypothesis) most HNers don't care about it. In conclusion i don't think that adding / subtracting something most people don't care about will solve ... anything.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#3I don't care about (HN) karma, and i believe (a.k.a. untested hypothesis) most HNers don't care about it. In conclusion i don't think that adding / subtracting something most people don't care about will solve ... anything.
Presumably part of the change would be that accounts with 0 karma would not be able to post? Perhaps the grandparent could elaborate.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#4I don't care about (HN) karma, and i believe (a.k.a. untested hypothesis) most HNers don't care about it. In conclusion i don't think that adding / subtracting something most people don't care about will solve ... anything.
I don't care much about karma. But, I do care about having the freedom to post stuff that I find interesting. Now, I am assuming that most of the noise will be either from new members or from members with low karma. If they are penalized something like 5 karma for submissions (and they can't submit if they don't have 5 karma), then that will both passively and actively discourage spamming.
A karma threshold can also be applied to new users to encourage them to first participate int he discussion and understand the ethos of HN.
Edit: I want to clarify that I am in favour of deducting karma for new submissions. The comment system is already fairly balanced thanks to the option to downvote. What I am suggesting is essentially a mirror image of the parent article.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#5Comments with so little value that they get downvoted already cost the commenter karma.
Most posts that have not reached the front page yet do not reach the front page at all. Comments on pages that do not reach the front page have much less opportunity to receive upvotes. This proposal risks discouraging comments on submissions that have not reached the front page; since some submissions only reach the front page because of the comments, this would harm HN.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#6How about giving more weight to upvotes from people with more Karma. I'm not sure if all upvotes are currently equal (I suspect they are).
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#7Wouldn't that mean there would be loads of crap posted to HN rather than just crap comments?
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#8Comments with so little value that they get downvoted already cost the commenter karma. Most posts that have not reached the front page yet do not reach the front page at all. Comments on pages that do not reach the front page have much less opportunity to receive upvotes. This proposal risks discouraging comments on submissions that have not reached the front page; since some submissions only reach the front page be…
You also don't want to penalize comments on articles that have dropped off the front page. They're useful to people who get to an article through Google. These readers are much less likely to be logged in and thus, much less likely to upvote.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#9The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments.
To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche.
The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like $2, would be fine.
Of course, this will never happen. This isn't really something I want to happen, but, to me, it seems to be the only way of limiting the user base in an effective manner.
Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post
#10The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments. To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche. The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like…
Although what's $2 for a site that I check every day?