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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

If endorsing comments too hastily risks the loss of that privilege, but endorsing comments correctly has only a social benefit...

I'll try to do my part, but I worry about the tragedy of the commons here. The current incentives may actively discourage endorsements.

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I was thinking the same thing. There's currently no known harm for upvoting, so we do it to promote good discussion, despite the fact that there's typically no personal benefit. But if endorsing posts not only provides no personal benefit but also bears the risk of possible harm, people might be too cautious with endorsements for this system to work.

One concern is that there's no direct feedback to the endorser, so he or she would have no sense of the relative importance of their endorsement to keeping the discussions rolling along. With visions of the Stack Overflow police, how high a bar should a comment have to pass? Although maybe that's a positive -- after all, we no longer directly see comment scores, only the derivative effect of thread reordering.

So, have a new meta-karma that is equal to the mods given to the posts you endorsed? (An alternative would be giving karma directly, or some fraction of karma).

[ed: spelling]

Perhaps that could work, although it goes a bit down the road toward heavier and more explicit mechanics, as at Slashdot and Stack Overflow. In another comment somewhere in this thread, pg mentions that he'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Unspoken is the "...but no simpler" part.

It's fun to consider that a dynamic system could provide someone on the back end (or a smart algorithm) with a variable nozzle controlling comment flow.

But endorsing not at all guarantees loss of that privilege, in that you're never actually exercising it. If the penalty doesn't extend further, I'm not sure the cost will discourage terribly much.

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