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

I simply cannot imagine doing that anywhere else.

And I doubt that any of my comments rate as insightful or beautiful. Yet stopping me making them would have killed those conversations.

I can agree that the submissions seem less interesting than 5 years ago, but the conversations engage me as much as ever, which is fine - HN has changed - it has become more necessary to participate - it is not wikipedia - its not supposed to be a passive read.I have been a lurker here longer than my username, and in the past year it has been noticeable that HN is more like a conference - the interesting stuff happens talking to people in the corridors.

My 2 cents suggestion - hashtag comment threads. Then the best comments, most insightful, most summarising, can be extracted on any given hashtag subject - a living FAQ if you like.

But don't make huge changes - the real stuff is about talking with other interesting people. Thats great - lets not risk it with big unproven changes.

Whether it be having to spend karma in order to post or some other scheme, I think it certainly would be interesting and allow people to tweak and provide feedback at a more massive scale.

Compare that to reddit where I go to find links but never open the comments because the comments are useless and have no value to me at all. The comparisons to reddit are completely baseless. HN is still the best place I've found for intelligent discussion.

What is the point? Looking at it, the idea implies a requirement where a scarce resource is depleted in order to contribute.

The hopeful goal is that quality of contribution goes up, since you are spending a scarce resource.

In order for this to matter at all and drive behavior, the amount of that scarce resource required to be spent must be significant enough to matter, -or non-trivial (what that amount is I don't know, but that is immaterial).

Here is the problem:

While the goal is changing posting behavior for the better, this system might have unintended consequences that have the opposite effect. Users may just start posting lowest common denominator (Hacker News version of it anyway) posts in order to just snag upvotes so that they always have plenty of karma to post. Essentially, it could encourage "karma-whoring" posts, and comments across the site could devolve in the aggregate if this behavior is adopted in any significant amount.

We all know about certain other social sites and the kind of chaff karma-farming brings in. HN mitigates this my keeping karma hidden among other things. This idea though, seems like a different mechanism that could easily encourage that behavior.