Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

slidetocode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 286 posts

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#11

Post by sgdesign »

rlt3 wrote: post #9

The 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…

Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro" tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#13

Post by laurencei »

franze wrote: post #2

I 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 think the idea is more like stackoverflow - where your points (karma) gives you access to certain things. If you have 0 karma - you cant comment. If you have low karma - you want to 'save' your posts for valid comments that are likely to get upvoted, thus giving you more karma to make more posts etc.

i.e. people who post 'crap' and get continually downvoted will eventually be silenced.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#14

Post by silvestrov »

It is difficult to restrain users from posting too often when creating new accounts are free: how do you compete with free?

You can't make it worse than creating a new account because then the users will just create a tons of new accounts.

So somehow you need to make account creation "more expensive" to be able to have a working cost/rate-limiting on posting.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#15

Post by rlt3 »

sgdesign wrote: post #11
rlt3 wrote: post #9

The 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…

Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro" tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.

I feel that this creates elitism. Anyone can buy a 'Pro' tag. What makes a person's comments, who is willing to spend money, better than one who is not?

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#16

Post by badclient »

mooism2 wrote: post #5

Comments 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…

Surely that can be addressed by weighing comments differently base on the position of the post or the number of page views etc.?

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#17

Post by ed209 »

franze wrote: post #2

I 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 do care about karma.

I care because it's a measure of whether what I say is agreeable or disagreeable. It's not about fitting in or following the herd, but if I say something that loses me karma I want to understand why. Maybe I'll end up with the same opinion anyway or maybe it teaches me to think more before I talk. Mostly, karma helps me reflect on my opinions and question those opinions.

The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they downvote_

If you agree with me, then an upvote with no commentary is fine. If you downvote me, tell me why. Maybe I could learn something, maybe I get the chance to explain myself better, maybe an open disagreement on a point enriches the community.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#18

Post by Spearchucker »

sgdesign wrote: post #11
rlt3 wrote: post #9

The 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…

Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro" tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.

I think that brings up new problems, e.g. dealing with someone with a paid account/subscription that submits enough posts or comments to get that person banned or hell-banned. Or a scenario in which a hell-banned user wants to upgrade to a paid account.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#19

Post by da_n »

I think this could possibly work if HN was a paid-to-post service, even if it was just $1 p/m. The only problem I can see otherwise is this would open the possibility of an underground currency for karma. It might result in user accounts who exist purely for karma collection, getting upvotes from droves of dummy/spam/bot accounts, then posting spam. It would be possible of course to try and detect this, but not trivial I would think to avoid false positives.

Re: A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

#20

Post by alttag »

ed209 wrote: post #17
franze wrote: post #2

I 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 do care about karma. I care because it's a measure of whether what I say is agreeable or disagreeable. It's not about fitting in or following the herd, but if I say something that loses me karma I want to understand why. Maybe I'll end up with the same opinion anyway or maybe it teaches me to think more before I talk. Mostly, karma helps me reflect on my opinions and question those opinions. The only thing I would…

... And much of the time, I think asking for a comment with a down vote is a good idea.

Except, there are obvious trolls. Or someone else has already explained why the comment was inappropriate.

It happens enough that the reason for the downvote seems—to me—facially clear ... so while I agree it's a good courtesy in most situations, I don't think enforcing it would help. Maybe a UI change could encourage this behavior (e.g., highlight "reply" on downvote), but this loses some of the clean look of HN ...

Post reply on HN