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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

This is why I went from just reading/commenting on the front page stories, to actually starting on the New tab and then working to the front page.

I also see a ton of upvoted stories on the front page with no comments. I always thought the focus of HN was the thoughtful conversations that took place around topics, not the accrual of fake internet points.

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I feel like number of comments should carry more weight than upvotes. Then upvoted comments could weigh the entire story up further too, pushing quality discussion over a simple upvote click.

Even better: if you upvote a story you should share the subsequent karma points on a pro-rata basis, i.e.: everyone who upvotes a story gets karma points equal to the total upvotes divided by the number of upvotes the story had when they upvoted it (or something like that). You'd have to balance that out by having it cost some karma points to cast an upvote. That would encourage people to seek out quality content on the new page.

slashdot worked (works) a bit similar, though you didn't pay with your own karma points. Instead you were granted a few voting points now and then, which made them feel scarcer, which encouraged considerate use.

This indeed sounds good at a first glance. However, it might encourage people to vote for stories that they think other people will like, which are not necessarily the quality stories.

>starting on the New tab

Is this not normal? It seems to be the default for me. I was reading HN for a while before I even realized there was a different 'front' page. 'front' doesn't appear as an option in the menu.

> I always thought the focus of HN was the thoughtful conversations that took place around topics, not the accrual of fake internet points.

Apparently, ranking is only a function of the time since submittal and the # of points. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:

> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted.

> … ranking is only a function of …

If you read the very next paragraph, you'll see that it's based on other factors too:

> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.

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