If you don't think a story will get 2-5 up votes, then you probably shouldn't submit it.
And I assure you that people who don't think about karma (I couldn't care less) will continue to not think about it.
And I assure you that people who don't think about karma (I couldn't care less) will continue to not think about it.
Unless a link is linkbait attention-whoring or breaking news, it's basically luck whether it gets that first upvote in its first few minutes to cause it to hit the front page. If you patrol "new" often, you'll see this constantly: tons of things in "new" are relevant articles, but still have no upvotes.
This problem only gets worse as HN grows in size.
Now, obviously, I have >4k karma and I shouldn't care at all about such a small karma cost. But the psychological effect exists regardless.
If each of us is so confident of our own abilities to rate articles impartially, be objective, etc., why are we putting so much thought into how to ensure that we can keep each other objective? If I believe that I can do it, why can't I believe that you can do it too?
Is anybody claiming this? I certainly am not. Quite the opposite.
1. How about not displaying the karma of new users for the first year?
2. The second insight is multiple postings from a news site. HN was good at recommending "hard to find" articles or esoterica. Where there are multiple people submitting the same link, it is probably not going to be hard to find or esoteric in the first place.
I like to see what other people think of my opinions and if I've touched a nerve. And I guess average comment score could conceivably be useful. But Total Karma just seems pointless. If the idea is to identify the oldtimers, then show their join date and be done with it.
Aside, I like not showing the points on articles.
I'm actually surprised at how much I like not showing points at all. I generally pride myself on carefully considering people's arguments and voting accordingly (if at all), but I've found myself reading comments much more carefully. It's too soon to tell what the effect will be in aggregate, but I my initial reaction is to hope the change is permanent.
If you just polled new submissions and cataloged the number of upvotes over time, you could establish the best time to submit an article. If you want to get fancy, you could add some sort of categorization to the metric and break it down by category (like: "articles about node.js seem to get the most attention when submitted Tuesdays at 3:00pm")