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Comment by LunaSea | Hacker News Reader

"How a team of astronomers embezzled crowd funders into buying them a new telescope by making them believe they will look for a 'Wow' signal explanation"

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That's so nastily uncharitable.

I understand the fun in painting what people are doing in the blackest possible colors. It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader. But in doing so, you smear black paint all over the parlor. We're trying to make HN a better place to be than that, so please don't play that game here.

Thanks, dang. It was once true that a surefire way to rack up a large amount of karma in HN was to make a nasty, uncharitable statement like that. I've experienced the weird ridiculous thrill of it myself, on another account, along with the deflating realization that I'm being rewarded (such as it is, karma having no actual value) for participating in the destruction of civilized discourse. I appreciate you actively stepping in and articulating the argument against such "parlor games" and the drive to make HN different in that way, even though I've seen that it doesn't always win you fans in the community.

>karma having no actual value

I believe additional HN abilities are granted based on an account's karma number.

Not really, no. The site karma thresholds are extremely low. They're an anti-abuse measure, not a reward.

You can label and the differences between extremely low karma accounts and 0 karma accounts however you'd like, but a low karma account has more power over the content of the site than a zero karma account.

I also don't think it can be easily ruled out that there are additional, higher karma thresholds upon which an account may be bestowed with additional powers (rate-limit loosening, for example).

It can easily be ruled out by asking us. The highest karma threshold (that I recall, at least) is the downvoting one at 500. Pretty much all the others are 30 or lower.

I feel reasonably confident that there aren't karma rewards for people with more karma than me, although there should be some kind of sick reward for it.

Read the comments of the article. It does appear to be a scam.

Even if so, the snark makes it harder to tell that this was the point.

LunaSea is making an interesting argument that I hadn't considered.

You on the other hand have levied a substance-less complaint about a user's attitude. Who is really undermining discourse here?

Pessimism ought to be welcome here. If you need protection from other people's attitudes go join a university safe space.

I actually appreciate your point a lot more than it probably seems like I do (not counting the rude bit, which was out of place and wide of the mark). The counterargument only becomes compelling when you start to think practically about the effect snark etc. has on online communities. This is an externality, so it is easy to overlook and not always in the interest of individual actors to take care of.

We could compare it to a company that makes a good product (in this case, a good point about funding and the politics of research) while polluting the local environment (the community here). The solution isn't to ignore the pollution, nor to justify it.

Fortunately for all of us, it's not only possible to make the product without polluting, but the product comes out better when one does so. But this doesn't happen by default; the default is the opposite. That's why I post moderation comments, at the cost of off-topicness. In the long run, the plan (and the unsolved system design problem!) is to get the desired effect without posting such things, which are as tedious to write as they are to read.

It's very easy to be snide, as your last sentence demonstrates; it's much harder, but more valuable, to give thoughtful criticism.

> That's so nastily uncharitable.

> It's a parlor game and gives a buzz to both the writer and reader.

Uh...

I agree that it's a rude and pointless comment, but there's really no reason to go so far with the armchair psychoanalysis.

What strikes you as being particularly psychoanalytic about it? The comment is certainly taking an unnecessarily cynical view of the topic, and doing so is almost always intended to position the author and those who he persuades as superior (i.e. "giving them a buzz").

Hey, as long as they buy a new telescope and do their best to make the measurements they're proposing then there's nothing shifty going on here as far as I can make out. Obviously nobody has to give anyone any money. (I am always a little extra skeptical of GoFundMe funds for specific projects though since the funds are transferred even if the goal is not met.)

You're getting downvoted into oblivion for the snarkiness of your post, but I'm inclined to agree with you based on things said in the comments at the end of the article, especially by user bllchkchps.

If LunaSea had mentioned those reasons and some supporting evidence, it would have been a better comment. Two of the points raised by bllckchps I've been able to verify for myself:

* The crowd funding campaign goal has been modified since the article was published. The article said the goal was $13,000, but the goal has now changed to $18,000. [1]

* Some of the content on The Center for Planetary Science website is just a cut and paste from Wikipedia with a few words changed. Compare [2] and [3].

[1] https://www.gofundme.com/wow-experiment

[2] http://planetary-science.org/astrophysics/black-holes/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

Someone in the comments at The Guardian said that the initial goal was actually $10,000. That number has been all over the place.

I'm interested in both crowdfunding and astronomy, but this particular campaign seems like one that should be avoided.

I just logged in today and it's requesting $20,000 now. That part of the campaign alone seems really odd....

Just be glad gofundme isn't a YC portfolio company. That would have earned you a full shadowban.

The truth is the opposite. We moderate less, not more, when YC companies are involved. That is literally the first thing PG taught me about how to moderate HN; I don't think I had even sat in a chair yet before he blurted it out.

This does leave a loophole in what people are able to get away with in threads, but it is worth the price to be able to address people's concerns about it in good conscience.

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