Ask HN: What if submitting a story cost 1 karma? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What if submitting a story cost 1 karma?

60 pointskarmakaze78 comments

Could this have the desired effect of reducing low-quality posts that the poster considers as such when posting? My habit is already only to post something that I personally want others to hear about, rather than 'maybe this will get a vote'.

It could potentially reverse the problem of so many stories being posted that so many don't even get to be seen and voted upon. It would also be great if some focus was brought back, tech is so much a part of everyday life that the intersection of tech and X is largely a general news feed.

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Karma has no value at the moment. It's best that it remains this way.

I would however love to be able to bump up a post of my choice to the front page for every, say, 1000 karma points earned. Let it have above normal gravity (i.e. make it sink quicker), but a chance to promote a single post once in a while would be genuienly cool.

Edit - to clarify, I don't mean that 5000 karma will give 5 boosts. Just one. You use it, you then wait for another 1000 points to get this perk reinstated. Or even start raising the cost with each boost - 1k, 2k, 5k, etc.

> I would however love to be able to bump up a post of my choice to the front page for every, say, 1000 karma points earned.

But that would make karma valuable though, leading to bad behavior we could all imagine. If you could boost an article with karma, startups would farm karma for free marketing. I like how karma are valueless, meaningless Internet points. I think it improves discussions by not rewarding groupthink-repetition.

EDIT: I’ll also point out we have 12 users[1] with more than 100k karma at the moment. 100 “boosts” each is an enormous amount of editorial control to a dozen users, even if you don’t assume ill intent. Let’s Keep Karma Useless!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

I think this makes selling HN accounts much more valuable, since if you have an old account that you don't use anymore you could probably find someone who wants to quickly get their startup in front of a bunch of techies for $100 or whatever. The way it is now, if someone wants to manipulate the front page they have to have a bunch of accounts coming from different IPs, etc.

Maybe it's a silly concern, but as more people come here every day it will become more and more of a target.

Not at all, this is absolutely what would eventually happen. Especially on a site with a bunch of entrepreneurs creating startups that need marketing.

I meant that the promo perk is a flag. If it's set, you can bump up the post. This clears the flag. Earn 1000 more points, flag is set again.

"Karma has no value at the moment". How do you know that ? At the very least this statement is wrong since you can not downvote with less than 500 karma. Do you have direct knowledge of the algorithm that pushes a post to the front page of HN ? If not, perhaps of the poster's karma is considered ?

I know dang commented on this multiple times before and gave some insight into this. IIRC it's somewhat along the lines of upvotes/time_squared and no user has more weight than another unless vote abuse protection triggers. Maybe someone has a link to these comments.

It’s relative. Karma has zero value to me, so it doesn’t factor at all in my decision to comment. It wouldn’t factor in my decision to post should I felt led to do so either.

I use a feed reader to read HN so I see all content without regards to its ranking on site as well, basically I get it pretty much in a when post created timeline. I prefer it that way, I don’t need my interests curated by others. I find that there are too many interesting things to read that would get buried.

I don't take my accounts on HN too seriously although I've been participating since x. I don't see myself putting a link to a comment or contribution on my resume that links to HN, because then I have to answer this obvious question: So you're a hacker?

Look at all my karma on Hacker News!

Reminds me of the time when I was in the public library and an autistic kid walks in and asks the librarian straight up: I'm looking for books on hacking, do you have any? That astounded her for about 10 seconds before I astounded her further with my response to his question. I know what he's looking for, I'll help him. She never looked at me the same way again.

>Karma has no value

>this statement is wrong since you can not downvote with less than 500 karma

But almost all of the time a downvote is a valueless vote.

It's a thing one wants (one, not you of course because you're above all that), and the price is having attained a certain karma.

That is a transaction of and for value.

It doesn't matter what the X is you want or what the Y is you have to trade to get it.

I love all these ideas - perhaps Dang could spin-up some 'experimental pages'... aka no need to alter the real/original HN feed but hell yeah to some alt-pages.

Could also use the underutilized HN poll feature to determine which are the most interesting to try.

Hiding karma (once over 500) might be a good thing.

>Karma has no value at the moment. It's best that it remains this way.

Exactly. One can't forget Goodhart's law.

HN is very smart about it. I like that you can downvote other posts only after reaching a certain karma threshold. (And I think "vouch"/un-shadow-delete at the same, or a higher, threshold?) Granting more abilities than that seems unwise.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...

Vouching and flagging are both granted at 31 karma.

And looks like downvoting is granted at 501 karma.

Also:

>Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.

This is a neat little touch I wasn't aware of.

You can already do it. If you find a very cool post you can send a mail to dang to get it into the second pool chance

Not for your own though... or at least it's not the idea.

Hey this solves both the karma not to have value and new users posting. Let karma be negative and display it as such.

Opportunities to spend karma lead to incentives to farm it.

I think that's bad for communities.

Lets credit a karma marketplace and find out.

Extra points if you can squeeze a NFT Derivatives market out of it...with margin accounts!

I guess "marketplace" requires a trigger warning now. I was inferring a HN feature to simply give your points to someone else.

Discouraging posting in general will decrease both the bad and good. That's bad.

I think the right focus is on increasing the amount of good content, not on decreasing the amount of bad. If you're focus is on the latter, you're more likely to put yourself in the situation of shooting yourself in the foot.

+ Downvote brigades can potentially swoop in and blow up all karma. It would not be helpful to encourage that.

In each comment, the karma is bounded by -4. Also, comments can not be downvoted after 12 or 24 hours. (I'm never sure.) So the damage of downvote brigades is bounded.

Also, the system probably can detect it and notify the mods and they fix the karma. (There are a lot of hidden unofficial features. They are part of the secret sauce. Some may be fictional.)

Also, if you see something like this, you can send an email to the mods to they can take a look.

I like the idea, however, there are many accounts on here that have a significant amount of karma gained through auto-posting already, and that greatly impacts the effectiveness of such a proposal.

For the heavy auto-posters, let's say that out of 20 auto-posts, only 1 gets any traction. I would imagine that they would happily still take the hit of 20 points, in order to gain 50 or more points from the one good post.

On the flip side, people with low karma would become increasingly timid to take any risks, and may shy away from posting altogether.

I feel in the long run it would result in the karma-rich getting richer.

An alternative proposal could be more focused on penalising excessive karma farming. E.g. require a gap of at least 20 mins since last post, or subtract 50 points for every 0 point/0 comment story submitted by a user, but calculate this at the end of the month.

I don’t think the problem is making people think before posting. HNs /new has a lot of great content in there but most of it gets little attention, I think the problem is there needs to be a system that encourages voting especially on posts with lower karma. Most posts in /new just get 0-2 upvotes, if there were more people giving good content a boost it would improve the overall quality. As it is now the posts that rise to the top are sort of random, the posts that rise to the top seem to be purely on the basis of the time of day it was posted and the title.

  >I don’t think the problem is making people think before posting...

I disagree. I'm probably in a minority here, but I browse HN by 'Newest' [0] as I tend to dip into the site for a few minutes, a couple of times a day and so 'new' content is more important to me than popular content.

Unfortunately, browsing the site this way really makes the noise to signal ratio stand out. If there's a biggish tech news story, it's not unusual to see it appear a dozen or more times in the first couple of pages, when the site is viewed this way. It's one of my pet hates --a lot more so than the subjective 'quality' of a post. I really wish there was some penalty for posting a submission that has already been posted. So maybe having to 'Pay [in karma] to Post' would help with this?

Slightly off-topic. But my other bug-bear at the moment is the annoying number of people submitting links to Tweets, as submissions. I mean, it's a common refrain on here 'This is not Reddit!' when someone is being childish or frivolous but, fuck's sake, you can't get more childish or frivolous than posting a link to a bloody tweet! I make it a matter of course to flag every submission I see, with a Twitter link --just stop it, already!

I also wish there was something like the excellent 'Google Hit Hider by Domain' Greasemonkey script [1] for HN, so that I could permanently block certain junk domains from ever showing up when I browse the site.

If anyone out there fancies a Javascript project to tinker with, you could do a lot worse than trying to build something like that!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

[1] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

Like you, I browse New exclusively; it’s the only way to see all the interesting and useful posts — many of which never make it into the ranked view. And so…

> I really wish there was some penalty for posting a submission that has already been posted

…is something I would really love to see. There are far too many duplicated breaking-news/issue-of-the-day posts and far too many “no one paid attention to me oh no i better post-repost-repost please pay attention to meeeeee!” posts. In both cases it’s just noise diluting the actually interesting stuff.

Why would this stop people posting "votebait" to try and get upvotes, which sounds like your objective? I think it would mainly discourage people who post very frequently, few of whom seem to be posting crap. There is already flagging/killing as a mechanism to drop spam or off-topic stuff.

This wasn't meant as a large effect to a small number of people, rather a small effect widely distributed to raise consciousness of self-assessed quality.

I'd like a way to award extra points for descriptive story titles - too many are esoteric/vague as to what they are really about.

There's only so much time in the day, I don't want to be clicking every link to really know if it's worth my time or not (and story votes alone can't do that).

I did that for a few of my posts and in the comments I was criticised for “editorialising”.

Maybe related - voting rings are definitely a thing on HN. An acquaintance pinged me to upvote their blogspam once as it would help their startup, and it got enough from people they messaged to make the front page. Not sure how much anti fraud is on HN but that seemed too easy to me.

That was one of the general ideas [1] driving a platform I created years ago. It never took but I keep it going because I'm still fully behind the deeper philosophy [2].

I'd be very interested getting some help to make it successful if anyone has a passion for the idea.

[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/pkqqs/the-genesis-of-v... [2] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works/

Not to be dismissive, but the UI, UX of that site is pretty terrible. I went there and browse a few links but the general feel of it is dated and poor quality.

No offense taken and, of course, the UI/UX would have to be redone. But to make that investment, more would have to be interested in the idea.

It's difficult topic, really.

First off - 1 karma is nothing

2nd thing if you increase this threshold, then you're going to lose content from people that arent active HNers

It might prevent some of the spam in /new if you aren't allowed to go karma negative.

karma farming is a thing

if somebody wants to put something in new, then he will

maybe not the day you enable restriction, but kinda later.

this is not technical problem, you cannot solve this with tech.

you gotta have strong community an mods

I can imagine the free karma upvote threads already.

Well, it hurts me infinitely more when I post a story, it goes on the front page and no one up votes it. My play bang bang against a neural network is the perfect example. I've submitted it kind 6 times (3 times linking the game, 3 times linking the source code) almost 0 interest.

Makes me wonder if the project is week, the code is bad or anything worse...

Just took a look at your submission. Here are a few things that might have caused low engagement.

1) Title could be better. It was the first time I've heard of Bangbang, I imagine the same applies to quite a few people. 2) The neural net might be impressive, but playing against doesn't give me a "wow".

The neural network starts fresh at each game. I could upload a version with a pre trained one, but it would hit you as soon as it's turn, so no one would like that.

I just checked it out. I have no idea why others did not upvote, but here was roughly my take:

- oh ok it’s gonna play some game called BangBang never heard of it but seems like it could be cool

- oh there’s no info here about what makes this special. Well let’s just go play the game and see what the fuss is about

- let’s see so I tap my screen and I shoot straight down. Opponent misses wildly. I’ll try long pressing, that looks like it’s probably how you aim the shot…oh nvm longpress just highlights the whole screen with no way to deselect.

So now I have a slightly better idea what BangBang is but I don’t get why it’s an interesting game, and I can see that there’s a program that solves it but it doesn’t look any different than an iterative guesser. I’m not really motivated to dig into the code to discover what’s interesting here at this point.

Hope you find that feedback helpful!

Bang bang came with windows 3.11 I guess. Two cannons shooting at each other at an angle, first one to hit wins

https://archive.org/details/win3_BANGBANG

It's probably just random, and/or timing. Making sure you time a post to align in the right magical way with the US timezones helps, but due to the volume, it remains random.

Here's the link for the project

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/bangBang

You really should edit your comment to have a link in it...

I don't think this is needed. The quantity of post posted everyday is not very high. And most interesting articles will show up on the front page at point or another.

The second pool chance works very well

Source : I maintain a daily newsletter about non-upvoted blog posts of HN

If you want to do something like this, I think it needs to be more focused on quality posting.

Like a separate "posting karma". If many of your posts are successful, it's easier for you to post, or you get a higher starting post upvote count.

But then you will have people contacting you for sponsored posts and you definitely don't want to create that kind of environment.

That would kill parts of HN - you could kiss `Ask HN` goodbye I think, as either new comers like to post those sometimes, or else someone wants to ask more anonymously so will create a burner account (so no points to post with).

How about looking at many vote the user's past post have received. If the recent posts average votes is below a threshold then you can't post. Perhaps with a way to redeem yourself.

Incentivising karma farming in any way would be a Bad Idea, I think. Getting karma is easy, just find a recent post on a recurring topic and echo the dominant opinion from last time.

There is so much study of human nature in this short remark.

I'm guessing this is implied, but if a user has 0 karma, this would mean they can't create a post until they get atleast one karma back (ie via a comment)?

I purposely didn't try to come up with solutions for newer users with the expectation that could be solved if the overall idea had merit.

I thought you could have negative karma on HN.

When you reach -1 your account gets banned and an email describing the situation is sent to the abuse address of your ISP.

Do you have a citation for that? Sending emails to abuse@ gets crickets a lot of the time yet seems a little drastic. Is being unpopular on the Internet against the ToS of any ISP?

The inverse stack overflow method

It might work better to make it more expensive to post multiple stories in some period of time (say 6 hours). Or maybe just install a universal rate limit.

Maybe a minimum karma threshold as well ? It would at least prove the poster has familiarity with the culture of HN and what content is most relevant.

It would only discourage new users from posting stories but have no effect on users who have had their submissions hit the front page before.

No. Low quality posts is subjective. The story upvoting is sufficient to make sure that interesting stories percolate to the top.

>The story upvoting is sufficient to make sure that interesting stories percolate to the top.

Not any more.

You need to always go to /new where it's almost always better than the main front page these days.

Only a few years ago it was just the opposite.

To get upvotes from a submission, apparently most important by far is the submission time rather than the headline or subject matter.

There is no bonanza of upvotes other than a popular submission.

Ideal submission time is not adequate however, you also would need to have enough good fortune for your submission to attract interest of whatever critical mass is necessary at the time to avoid dropping like a rock.

Each year a greater majority of excellent technical/business submissions drop faster than before, so anything that actually gets enough interest for the front page any more is like winning the lottery.

More dependent on luck than anything else, so some people are going to play as often and game the system as much as they can depending on their determination to "win".

Putting scores to things encourages system gaming, leading to unwanted side effects. See pagerank for example.

Could it be run as a consensual experiment for a couple days? Just to try out and learn about the effects?

Charging members (in karma) to post could work, but 1 karma wouldn't do it. Try 100.

That incentivizes the sort of things that get lots of upvotes though, which are often controversial or are complaints about some big company or practice. Some of the best submissions are deeply technical ones that only get 20-30 upvotes.

That would overly favour high reputation accounts

I currently consider submitting anything to HN a waste of time because there are just too many links for the community to evaluate. I'd happily "pay" hundreds of karma to indicate that my submission is worth reading.

I think we want the same thing, but your suggestion is to accept the large volume of mediocrity and pay for something you strongly believe in. Someone else suggested this too. I think both have value and are operating at opposite ends of the spectrum of the same issue. Paying for display may also have negative consequences, like promoted 'search results'.

I score a lot better than 1 point per submission so this wouldn’t affect me terribly.

How about submitting more than 1 story cost 100 karma within 24 hours?

this is not technical problem, you cannot solve this with tech.

you gotta have strong community and mods

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