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

This has already been mentioned elsewhere but comments with little value are already penalized when people downvote them.

If you notice more crap comments that aren't being downvoted that's because a) the community standards are changing and b) there's no good way to penalize all crap comments anyway - some will slip through the cracks. And as a result of b) great comments will slip through the cracks, which means people will lose points needlessly even when they're not trolling.

I'm not saying your proposal wouldn't have an impact on trolls. But there would likely be an awful lot of collateral damage.

I do care about Karma, it's how I know I'm doing a good job, that regardless of my opinion, people agree with my reasoning and the argument I've put forth, I put thought in to my posts, not just posting for the sake of it and it would be a shame to see that go to waste by being penalized before I've even had the chance to be heard.

This aside, I believe that HN doesn't need improving, I'm a long time reader and it annoys me when people seem to see some kind of downwards trend in the content, it's a news aggregation site, in essence, so perhaps this "downwards trend" people seem to be observing is merely the winds changing direction in terms of news.

HN has always been start ups, HN has always been popularity contests between brands and programming languages, the fact that it seems to be consumed these days by Apple-Samsung etc, is because that is what is in the news at the moment, eventually that will change to some other dominant topic and people will claim they are sick of seeing that too.

As I said before, this is a news aggregation site. The sum of all the content in a particular genre is the overwhelming majority of content on here. That only changes when some other trend starts to emerge, until then we have to wait.

For the record, I for one am also sick of reading about Apple-Samsung, but I'm more than content to sift through it to find the quality content which exists on here (not that the content isn't quality coming from Apple-Samsung, just that it is fairly monotonous now.)

The solution you are proposing also would silence users accounts permanently without any chance for redemption, those users would become disaffected and resentful, and with the trivial nature of account creation here, might cause new problems.

HN is a community, and I think a system that promotes corrective behavior (like the current one) works best when it exerts negative social pressure for "bad" posts and helps new users integrate themselves into the community.

If you've ever seen the movie "Hackers", the character "Joey" is a total noob, and the other characters are constantly giving him negative feedback when he does something stupid, eventually he learns a few things and becomes more useful.