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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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