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Ask HN: How about a word ration economy for brevity/value/time saving?

2 points by brendonjason ↗ HN
My personal model for clear and concise communication is Stephen Hawking; perhaps his proficiency at getting to the point is based on the fact that it takes a lot of effort for him to communicate, and so he, unlike most people, is forced to think about what is worth saying and the best way to say it.

Having said that, perhaps it's time to entertain the idea of a word economy on Hacker News, ie, some sort of daily/weekly "word count account" ... perhaps based on seniority/points ... that would counterbalance the compulsive counter-comment inspiring nature of this service.

Debate is sometimes good; scrolling down and down and down to get past endless trails of points/counter-points of exponentially decreasing marginal value to the original post seems like an exercise in obsessive-compulsive disorder reinforcement.

Surely having a set amount of words one can use in any given day for comments/responses would inspire more "on-point" and brief commentary that would make numerous editing features of this site redundant?

It's still free speech, just limited, self-edited free speech.

Flame away ...

3 comments

[ 14.7 ms ] story [ 559 ms ] thread
DanielStraight
It seems like it would also inspire a lot of pointless, "I agree!" comments.
[dead] brendonjason
But that's the point - since a potential poster of "I agree" would be adding no value whatsoever to the discussion, and may perhaps be the kind of person who posts "I agree" on multiple posts just to get points, every time he/she posts "I agree" they would lose out.

If you only had 50 words a day, posting "I agree" just cost you 4% of your daily ration of words. So chances are you wouldn't post "I agree" 10x just to try to increase your points.

Because YOU NEVER KNOW when a REALLY interesting post that you really, really want to comment on may come along and now you don't have enough words left to make the comment you wanted.

Which may inspire some sort of word-ration trading economy aspect to HN, ie, more "involved" people with many points may wish to "trade" points for word "credits" with newbies, thus balancing out the point spread a bit.

This would decrease the value of points associated with identities, but increase the value of words, thus making short, brief comments all the more valuable.

Maybe. I don't know. It would be a nice experiment I think.

rewind
I'd rather not read something that's too long and/or off-topic than take away someone's ability to post it. This type of system sounds way too complicated. I've read some AMAZING long responses here. And I've read total crap where the main point could have been made in 20 words.

And basing it on seniority/points is pointless. There are people who have been here for ages who have more karma than I'll have in the next 20 years. Some of them post a lot, and some of them go on-and-on. Just because they have karma doesn't mean they don't sometimes post long-winded junk. But that's no different than people with fewer points. Some content is good; some isn't.

Every community has its strengths and weaknesses. That doesn't mean we have obsess over eliminating the weaknesses. As you become more active in the community, you just learn to change your behavior accordingly.