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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this system is it actively penalizes use. I see the point of wanting users to have skin in the game, but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so. If you extrapolate that across all users, you may gain more quality content, but using the site would feel like being punished. And with a social news site, your biggest problem is gaining critical mass. The last thing you should do is discourage use in any way.

Instead of penalizing those things, you should be using them as a metric for measuring site use. Pinterest, for example, would use "repins" as a way to see how much the users are enjoying their experience. Reddit and HN might use upvotes or comments. What you want is as much content as possible and a good sorting method to weed out the best stuff, which is what HN has.

But I could be wrong; we'll have to wait and see.

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And the fact that it's 2% rather than some fixed amount means that it costs established users more to post, and new users less. Which seems somewhat backwards.

But with more initial karma points, the high-karma user's post would appear before the new user's, giving it a visibility bonus in exchange for the extra karma cost. Seems like a worthwhile trade for high-karma users, though it would skew the most visible content towards that of high-karma users and raise the barrier to entry for new users, for better or worse.

The 2% reminds me a little of the ELO system of chess. The stronger you are the higher is your risk (i.e. when playing against a much weaker opponent) which is good. Only because you are sitting on 10K of Karma won't hinder to post crap and opinionated stuff on HN right now. It could keep threads more in balance and bringing refreshing views on old subjects

I suspect this policy would lead to a Keynesian recession in karma due to a constriction in the circulation of points.

> ...but if I had to give up 2% of my HN "karma" to post this comment, I probably wouldn't do so.

But, is that necessarily undesirable? I don't think that a social network should be looking to encourage idle chatter; look at what a cesspool Reddit has become. I'm having trouble seeing a downside to encouraging people to only post when they really have something important or useful or substantial to add.

You don't always know how valuable your comment is when you post it. That's why being validated through voting is so great.

Being penalized for posting an opinion that you don't even know will be popular is not going to end well. In this case, people will only post things that will give them high karma.

Commenting on The List costs nothing. The List encourages discussion between members. Posting does cost karma, however, to force people to put 'skin in the game' when posting. They should be able to feel confident that they can recollect their karma that they used to post with upvotes.

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