Poll: Are polls on HN just a social hack to gain karma?

1 point·sippndipp··5 comments

I've seen a lot of polls lately. These polls mostly come with predefined choices (as comments) that can be upvoted. Are these polls really used or are the authors just hacking their way to a high karma rank?

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I think the issue with polls isn't the fact they could be used to exploit the community for points, but rather the fact you can vote for more than one option in the survey which kind of subtracts away from its credibility. I don't doubt some people have the intention of getting points in mind, but I am willing to bet that most have the right intentions.

Unlike other communities such as Reddit or the old Digg, the Hacker News community is slightly more mature and make more rational decisions than those of other communities where trolling is rewarded. People on HN if suspicious won't be afraid to call someone out and well, I haven't seen it happen. So either people out there are outsmarting everyone or perhaps nobody sees the point in gaming the site for points. Bad content rarely makes it to the front page.

The approved way of submitting a poll is at http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll --- this gives us proper poll options that do not end up hidden by other comments, and do not count towards karma.

You will have noticed that some people mercilessly down vote all comments-masquerading-as-poll-options, to discourage this sort of karma whoring.

Highly unlikely since the polls have to be thought of and successful. It's much easier to just add the dozen most popular, mainstream, generic tech news sites to your preferred RSS reader and then submit whatever they spew out.

Yes

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