Ask HN: What if submitting a story cost 1 karma?
Could this have the desired effect of reducing low-quality posts that the poster considers as such when posting? My habit is already only to post something that I personally want others to hear about, rather than 'maybe this will get a vote'.
It could potentially reverse the problem of so many stories being posted that so many don't even get to be seen and voted upon. It would also be great if some focus was brought back, tech is so much a part of everyday life that the intersection of tech and X is largely a general news feed.
84 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI think the right focus is on increasing the amount of good content, not on decreasing the amount of bad. If you're focus is on the latter, you're more likely to put yourself in the situation of shooting yourself in the foot.
Also, the system probably can detect it and notify the mods and they fix the karma. (There are a lot of hidden unofficial features. They are part of the secret sauce. Some may be fictional.)
Also, if you see something like this, you can send an email to the mods to they can take a look.
I would however love to be able to bump up a post of my choice to the front page for every, say, 1000 karma points earned. Let it have above normal gravity (i.e. make it sink quicker), but a chance to promote a single post once in a while would be genuienly cool.
Edit - to clarify, I don't mean that 5000 karma will give 5 boosts. Just one. You use it, you then wait for another 1000 points to get this perk reinstated. Or even start raising the cost with each boost - 1k, 2k, 5k, etc.
Exactly. One can't forget Goodhart's law.
HN is very smart about it. I like that you can downvote other posts only after reaching a certain karma threshold. (And I think "vouch"/un-shadow-delete at the same, or a higher, threshold?) Granting more abilities than that seems unwise.
Vouching and flagging are both granted at 31 karma.
Also:
>Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions.
This is a neat little touch I wasn't aware of.
I use a feed reader to read HN so I see all content without regards to its ranking on site as well, basically I get it pretty much in a when post created timeline. I prefer it that way, I don’t need my interests curated by others. I find that there are too many interesting things to read that would get buried.
Look at all my karma on Hacker News!
Reminds me of the time when I was in the public library and an autistic kid walks in and asks the librarian straight up: I'm looking for books on hacking, do you have any? That astounded her for about 10 seconds before I astounded her further with my response to his question. I know what he's looking for, I'll help him. She never looked at me the same way again.
>this statement is wrong since you can not downvote with less than 500 karma
But almost all of the time a downvote is a valueless vote.
That is a transaction of and for value.
It doesn't matter what the X is you want or what the Y is you have to trade to get it.
Maybe it's a silly concern, but as more people come here every day it will become more and more of a target.
But that would make karma valuable though, leading to bad behavior we could all imagine. If you could boost an article with karma, startups would farm karma for free marketing. I like how karma are valueless, meaningless Internet points. I think it improves discussions by not rewarding groupthink-repetition.
EDIT: I’ll also point out we have 12 users[1] with more than 100k karma at the moment. 100 “boosts” each is an enormous amount of editorial control to a dozen users, even if you don’t assume ill intent. Let’s Keep Karma Useless!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
I think that's bad for communities.
Could also use the underutilized HN poll feature to determine which are the most interesting to try.
Unfortunately, browsing the site this way really makes the noise to signal ratio stand out. If there's a biggish tech news story, it's not unusual to see it appear a dozen or more times in the first couple of pages, when the site is viewed this way. It's one of my pet hates --a lot more so than the subjective 'quality' of a post. I really wish there was some penalty for posting a submission that has already been posted. So maybe having to 'Pay [in karma] to Post' would help with this?
Slightly off-topic. But my other bug-bear at the moment is the annoying number of people submitting links to Tweets, as submissions. I mean, it's a common refrain on here 'This is not Reddit!' when someone is being childish or frivolous but, fuck's sake, you can't get more childish or frivolous than posting a link to a bloody tweet! I make it a matter of course to flag every submission I see, with a Twitter link --just stop it, already!
I also wish there was something like the excellent 'Google Hit Hider by Domain' Greasemonkey script [1] for HN, so that I could permanently block certain junk domains from ever showing up when I browse the site.
If anyone out there fancies a Javascript project to tinker with, you could do a lot worse than trying to build something like that!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
[1] https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
> I really wish there was some penalty for posting a submission that has already been posted
…is something I would really love to see. There are far too many duplicated breaking-news/issue-of-the-day posts and far too many “no one paid attention to me oh no i better post-repost-repost please pay attention to meeeeee!” posts. In both cases it’s just noise diluting the actually interesting stuff.
Like a separate "posting karma". If many of your posts are successful, it's easier for you to post, or you get a higher starting post upvote count.
First off - 1 karma is nothing
2nd thing if you increase this threshold, then you're going to lose content from people that arent active HNers
if somebody wants to put something in new, then he will
maybe not the day you enable restriction, but kinda later.
this is not technical problem, you cannot solve this with tech.
you gotta have strong community an mods
Makes me wonder if the project is week, the code is bad or anything worse...
1) Title could be better. It was the first time I've heard of Bangbang, I imagine the same applies to quite a few people. 2) The neural net might be impressive, but playing against doesn't give me a "wow".
- oh ok it’s gonna play some game called BangBang never heard of it but seems like it could be cool
- oh there’s no info here about what makes this special. Well let’s just go play the game and see what the fuss is about
- let’s see so I tap my screen and I shoot straight down. Opponent misses wildly. I’ll try long pressing, that looks like it’s probably how you aim the shot…oh nvm longpress just highlights the whole screen with no way to deselect.
So now I have a slightly better idea what BangBang is but I don’t get why it’s an interesting game, and I can see that there’s a program that solves it but it doesn’t look any different than an iterative guesser. I’m not really motivated to dig into the code to discover what’s interesting here at this point.
Hope you find that feedback helpful!
https://archive.org/details/win3_BANGBANG
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/bangBang
Not any more.
You need to always go to /new where it's almost always better than the main front page these days.
Only a few years ago it was just the opposite.
To get upvotes from a submission, apparently most important by far is the submission time rather than the headline or subject matter.
There is no bonanza of upvotes other than a popular submission.
Ideal submission time is not adequate however, you also would need to have enough good fortune for your submission to attract interest of whatever critical mass is necessary at the time to avoid dropping like a rock.
Each year a greater majority of excellent technical/business submissions drop faster than before, so anything that actually gets enough interest for the front page any more is like winning the lottery.
More dependent on luck than anything else, so some people are going to play as often and game the system as much as they can depending on their determination to "win".
There's only so much time in the day, I don't want to be clicking every link to really know if it's worth my time or not (and story votes alone can't do that).
For the heavy auto-posters, let's say that out of 20 auto-posts, only 1 gets any traction. I would imagine that they would happily still take the hit of 20 points, in order to gain 50 or more points from the one good post.
On the flip side, people with low karma would become increasingly timid to take any risks, and may shy away from posting altogether.
I feel in the long run it would result in the karma-rich getting richer.
An alternative proposal could be more focused on penalising excessive karma farming. E.g. require a gap of at least 20 mins since last post, or subtract 50 points for every 0 point/0 comment story submitted by a user, but calculate this at the end of the month.
you gotta have strong community and mods
The second pool chance works very well
Source : I maintain a daily newsletter about non-upvoted blog posts of HN