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Comment by DarkShikari | Hacker News Reader

If you don't think a story will get 2-5 up votes, then you probably shouldn't submit 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.

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Timing can play such a critical role in an article gaining traction, that a lack of votes is not necessarily indicative of a lack of quality - e.g. right now, there is probably a worthy article on the new page that someone actively using no-procrast won't see because it is in competition with this announcement from PG.

Aside, I like not showing the points on articles.

>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.

Crowdbooster is a YC company right? They should totally implement a feature for the best time to submit an HN article like they do currently do with the best time to tweet.

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")

The role of timing is interesting. It makes me wonder if a time-of-day-and-week based weighting could help out to reduce the need for posters to be so concerned about when they are posting.

What if the front page had a few random picks from the "new" page to give a little random extra exposure to undiscovered stories? They'd be different for each user...

Adding to your comment, it could also encourage group-think: "I'll only submit what I know others find cool." Note: I'm saying this as someone who submits stuff I think is very cool but doesn't get voted up very often.

I'm pretty surprised by the amount of fundamental attribution error displayed in this thread.

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?

If each of us is so confident of our own abilities to rate articles impartially

Is anybody claiming this? I certainly am not. Quite the opposite.

But, uh, so what? Does something bad happen if your karma goes negative? That might be an issue. Otherwise, I don't get why people care.

I like the way this discussion is going. It is strange how karma could encourage people to act in a counter productive way.

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 don't get why a cumulative karma score even exists.

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.

It's probably an experiment in reputation. There was time when people would try to optimize their site's PageRank. The moment you start measuring things, magical emergent behaviors are created.

PageRank in theory relates to how well my site ranks. Does having high karma make my comments float to the top? Or show up in a bolder font?

Not as far as I know. You are free to ignore that number.

The point to cumulative karma is to feed the rodent-like portion of our brain which likes getting slow, semi-random rewards. There's a tiny amount of satisfaction you get every time you look at your karma score and see that it's gone up since last time you looked at it... and a tiny amount of disappointment every time you see it go down.

Exactly. It's the same basic principle that Farmville uses for more nefarious purposes. It's a method of encouraging participation and engagement, which makes it very effective for cultivating a community of like-minded individuals.

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