Ask HN: How would you assess the value of HN karma? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How would you assess the value of HN karma?

4 pointsJ3L24049 comments

Today a HN user challenged another to a wager to be paid in karma:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004035

Which got me thinking - How would you assess the value of HN karma?

Yes $0.00, thanks. But how do you determine its value?

I think it's kind of non-linear. You have a user with ~18000 karma wagering against a user with ~6000 karma. Moving from 18000 to 17000 karma would have no impact on rms' HN experience or general ranking. Similarly, paul is not going to get any big bump in going from 6000 to 7000.

Now, if paul was a new user with 5 karma, the 1000 point bump would open up options on HN that he did not previously have. It would also boost his perceived ranking slightly from an unvetted newbie to someone with roughly first-tier status.

So, the value of 1000 karma isn't some baseline value multiplied by 1000. It varies by user based on the relative impact it has to that user.

> Similarly, paul is not going to get any big bump in going from 6000 to 7000.

Actually, the bump from 6k to 7k would put you very close to /leaders.

To me it is the old Gentleman's bet of a dollar. More or less worthless outside of the fact that you must admit defeat, and surrender something. The thing surrendered doesn't matter or have any value beyond the symbolic.

Why should anyone care? If you base your value of someone's opinion on their karma then you aren't really thinking for yourself. Someone with 1000's of karma points (even hundreds) just means they've been around a while, spent quite a bit of time, and had enough posts that resonated on the front page. Dig through posts that get few comments and you'll find some gems (they've just been overlooked).

And, really, what is the value of karma? Comment first and be insightful or funny - likely to get points if it hits front page. Comment late and be insightful or funny - likely to get a couple of points if it stays front page. Comment on anything not on front page - likely to be overlooked and even if you are insightful you may not get any karma, even from the OP.

Karma is kinda silly and even talking about it is sillier.

The price of one karma point is upper-bounded by the cost of making it yourself. Since you could just create a sock puppet to upvote yourself (assuming newbies may vote -- haven't kept track of the catalog) in a minute, and the minute is worth $0 (because HN is a sweet waste of time), one karma point can't cost more than $0.

However, the price isn't linear. You can't boost yourself by a million that way because PG would notice. So million-point karma packages could actually have a nonzero monetary value.

Creating a sock puppet and upvoting yourself is against the secret HN rules. Please don't do it.

Sock puppet karma points are worth negative karma.

Self-upvoting is at least bad style. I'm not advocating to do it, just trying to estimate the minimum price if one wants to get karma somehow.

As for negative karma, does HN actively detect sock puppets to punish them?

Creating an account to upvote yourself is against the rules and HN has sock-puppet detection software that is not fully published in the open source release of news.arc. Reddit similarly has sock puppet detection software... all social news sites beyond a certain size need software like this or things like the home page being taken over by internet marketers happens.

Who wants to give me stuff in exchange for karma IOUs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com