HN Explorer

Poll: should submitting new articles require non-trivial karma ?

3 points by huhtenberg ↗ HN
Just to counter this sort of misuse of HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=blogzilla

Perhaps, allow one submission per 5 karma points until karma grows over 100. This ensures that people are actively contributing to the discussion and not just dumping links on a front page.

10 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] thread
crazyirish
Who cares if a user is contributing to the discussion by comments if the articles they submit contribute to the discussion?
huhtenberg
Show me a HN account that earned its karma exclusively from up-moded article posts.
alnayyir
raises hand sheepishly I'll admit, it's where the vast majority of mine come from.

I ask you guys questions all the time :D

stcredzero
If a user is only out to get traffic for their sites, then they will tend to submit much and comment little. However, there are bound to be other users who are sincerely contributing who just happen to prefer submitting over commenting. (Should we call them "submissives?" jk)

So there is a reason to care, but distinguishing the exploiters isn't straightforward.

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kleevr
To the title of the Poll I say 'No' because a new user ought to be able to submit something interesting even if they haven't said anything in the forum. That said, I second the idea of rate limiting based on low karma.

It would be an interesting dynamic if it cost X karma to submit an article, if you're karma was zero, you could submit once a day or something...

neilk
I initially agreed with you, but in a world where anybody can generate as many accounts as they want, allowing users with zero karma to submit doesn't change anything.

If we want to restrict posting access, the community has to have some pre-approval process. Whether it's by comment karma, friend graph, required posting approval by someone else with karma > N, etc.