Hacker News Reader

Comment by partingshots | Hacker News Reader

> It’s gotten to the point now where I sometimes think about writing a comment to “send it out to gain karma” in the same way that I think about “sending off a unit to collect resources” in an RTS.

This was an extraordinarily poignant quote that I empathize with greatly. The only reason I’m sharing it as a comment is because I believe that I can now also gain some karma with it as well.

What does this mean? Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

View on HN

I've had -3 karma for about 6 years now. Kind of proud of it. My only comment was trying to be helpful with a link but it got downvoted a bit.

oh— what to do— what to do....

That has happened to me.

I gave you an upvote.

I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Karma is nice to have for me. If I post something, and see my karma go up by 10 points, I think “oh that’s nice”, but I don’t then go to “how do I get 20 the next time”? Likewise if it goes down 10 points, I think “wow some people didn’t like my comment, oh well”. In the end my karma is generally trending up, which I take to mean I’m generally adding more than I’m detracting. If it was generally trending down, I might consider if I’m coming across wrong / being misunderstood , or maybe something is wrong with the people here!

Also if you want more karma, just repost old posts that got a lot of votes, like the OP did :D. Likely to at least some votes esp if still relevant.

> I think it’s dangerous to make comments just for karma. Then you will be less likely to take risks.

Interesting perspective. One of the easiest ways to gain karma from comments is writing a "The article gets it completely wrong. Here's why..." type comment[1]. HN highly rewards this kind of comment. Discussion after discussion is riddled with them. It might help to exemplify taking risks in the space of possible comments. There are a number of interesting axes in this space.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JadeColoredGlass...

HN should highly reward this kind of comment, because it aids the reader in determining what to spend their limited time in reading. If it is done well. Editor, not censor. Not “I don’t like this political view”, but “The assertions aren’t supported by facts” or “These facts should also be considered”. Anyone who spent any time judging Baldrige Quality Award submissions would know the drill.

Early on, karma meant you had an interesting comment. If the comment made you comment, it was pretty automatically worthy of an upvote, even if you disagreed.

Later, it turned into more of an agree-disagree vote.

As someone who recently hunted for karma, it's pretty easy. First you have to decide if you want to slowly amass karma by comments, or try to get lucky by submitting links. Submitting links is easier if you have a source to draw upon. There is a newest links page on a certain crustacean-named website which is a good source for this. If you've been reading HN, then you should have a good idea which articles will appeal to this audience and curating these links (mostly based on the headline) is a 5-10 minute exercise. Think of it as link arbitrage.

Posting comments might be easier if you don't have a source for new links. Again, if you have a pulse on HN, it's not too hard. You don't even have to lie, just slant your take to appeal to the audience. HN loves clever hacks, cynicism, free speech, definite statements. Often times it's better to be a little bit wrong because your comment will attract a lot of rebuttals trying to correct you.

I receive this post's stimulus, condense my individual thoughts into a new stimulus, and output it as a post for future readers. Sometimes I receive stimuli from those readers (votes, responses) and the cycle feeds back on itself, usually attenuating until the conversation fades out but occasionally amplifying in intensity until the conversation fails spectacularly (ban, rage-quit, Godwin's law, etc). We're the neurons in this society's brain.

On karma points (roughly how aligned is the individual's signaling with the group's signaling), it's useful to the individual for calibrating their (outputted) opinions to better align with the group's. That was a critical piece of surviving as a social creatures.

The same author has a post from 2013 (3 years after "Why I stopped reading HN") addressing what is lost when programmers chase internet points.

https://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-...

It resonates with me because I often find myself scrolling HN when I was meaning to be working on a project, both at work and at home.

Interesting because in the original post, he declares his resolve to quit HN and declares that he's not visited it in one whole month. "Yeah, right", I thought, and indeed in the intervening 3 years, he came back.

I'd wager most of us have needed a break at some point. I myself have gone through at least 4 accounts since 2006. I periodically "delete" them by setting minaway to 999999999. The act of starting over with a new account with zero fake internet points does help keep their value in perspective, though.

I don't know if this[0] will help with your scrolling but it helps with mine. I made it so I could more quickly scan new stories today not mixed amongst popular stories from past days. It also groups common themes (e.g. covid, etc) so I can scan/skip them as a group, leaving the unclassified/interesting stories at the top. Any/all feedback welcome.

[0] https://hackerer.news/

This is why I think the future is actually in smaller action-based forums. Like, if you want to achieve something, you would join a group based on that goal, and it would not be structured around posts/news, it would instead be structured in a way that would break down the goal into finer and finer chunks, that people could collaborate on and actually submit/assign/judge tasks to perform.

All this karma circlejerking is getting boring. Nothing gets done.

Totally agree. We could even give it a name, like Usenet or sth?

> sth

What is sth?

something[0]

[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sth

Are these the beginning signs of an addiction to fake internet points?

Probably.

I wonder if karma was hidden from us if it would do something to curb this compulsiveness. Seeing instant feedback, a number going up or down is very stimulating compared to nothing, or even a very broad "over 0/under 0" status as a middle ground.

Fun History Fact: HN used to show the karma of every single comment to every single user! This was changed for exactly this reason.

You can still get the "over/under 0" because posts under zero get progressively grayed out the farther under zero they go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com