Hacker News Reader

Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. 20 rep is about 5 or 6 good answers, depending on how lucky you are and how popular your technology of choice is. How many people are going to put in that much effort just so that they can use a chatroom?

View on HN

How is it 5-6 "good" answers? You get 10 rep per up vote. I'd imagine any "good" answer would get at least 1 vote, so I would say 2 answers, 3 at max.

If they aren't willing to answer or ask a question to use a chat room structured around answering and asking questions, I think I'm okay with the situation.

You're essentially proving that the rep requirement is valid because if you're not interested enough to answer a few questions, the chat probably isn't for you.

I have 21 rep with 1 answer and 1 question....

You must have a strange definition of "good" or only answer questions about the most obscure topics imaginable (more obscure than, say, the practical applications of functional zippers). Your numbers would require an average of 0.3 upvotes per good answer and they assume that not a single answer is accepted. If you average one upvote per answer, two would be sufficient. If an answer is accepted, that automatically puts you over 20 rep.

Two upvotes or one accepted answer is enough. You don't get 1 karma per upvote as on HN.

FWIW, that rep-to-answer ratio is far from my experience; though I don't know the site-wide average, and I mostly posted over a year ago.

I'm not saying it's not too much of a hassle -- of course that's up to you.

Even a couple of mediocre questions can get you 20 points on SO. Something as fundamental as "Why is this pointer returning an address in memory instead of a value?" will get you upvoted at least a few times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com