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

And my thoughts "Here's an idea: Have karma and voting tied together. Your Karma is basically how much votes you get to give. If someone makes a good post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma. The person made the post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote other posts. We can limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way they can vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality articles/posts. Now it works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too, thus making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action will cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without thinking. Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote positive contribution and dissuade useless contributions. The tricky part is balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons votes/karma from the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes into the system. Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10 votes each month. But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must first contribute enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100 upvotes to your posts/contributions)."

I do feel that some tweaks here and there could be useful, and I suspect that this is happening on a somewhat regular basis. My own pet peeve is that down-votes ought to cost you something and that down-voting should require a comment. Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not pollute threads too much.

We are all guilty to some degree of adding pollution. This is a group of human beings, not algorithms. It will happen. And this is normal.

As a libertarian and real working entrepreneur who has founded and run several companies, succeeded and failed, I tend to react negatively to very liberal views and views not necessarily rooted in real entrepreneurial experience.

On the political end, some of the younger minds on HN have been politically polluted by the liberal bend of our universities and mainstream media. Until they have a collision with reality they then to simply parrot what was driven into their heads because that's all they know.

On the business end, there are a lot of people posting on HN that have never actually started or run a real business, leased space and equipment, hired and fired, had to deal with the various corrupt liberal labor boards, had to deal with taxation and regulation, the agony of business problems and the exhilaration of business success and a myriad of other real-world forces that a business has to face on a daily basis. Yet, they'll come to HN and think that because they read the internet they understand business.

All of this is OK to some degree or another. As I said, it's human nature and this is a group of human beings.

I like HN and want it to remain a high-quality source of interesting discussions relevant to the tech entrepreneur (and not just about which LISP is better!). I'll do my part and try to refrain from reacting to some of the aforementioned posts unless I can truly add valuable insights. Maybe others should also take a moment to re-examine their behavior patterns and see what could be improved. It's probably that simple.

This is an internet forum, not a hashtable; uniqueness is not a design requirement, conversation, discussion and thought are, so I intend to have many more "Fire Aim Ready" moments.

If I think about something strongly enough I will write about it, often post it and if people are interested enough in it, they will discuss it. I'm sure most ideas problems and potential solutions have been mentioned somewhere in mankind's 4000 years of written words, but context changes over time and many conversions are worth having as many times as necessary before a problem is solved.