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At what point does the HN Karma becomes "just another number" for you

4 points by yashchandra ↗ HN
I am a new user and every karma point I get, I keep coming back for more :). I was wondering if the veterans out here had similar feeling in their early days and once you cross a certain threshold, it is just another number. is it 1000 ? 5000?

8 comments

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benologist
Karma stopped meaning something when I realized people can blindly submit an endless stream of shit from nice safe sites as soon as the stories hit their RSS readers and rack up far more than anyone can earn through normal use.
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dalke
Some are not so blind - some people only post links to, say, theatlantic (see alexismadrigal) or outsideonline (see nbj914). Another one I saw had a history of posting only to one site, then a few months ago started posting links only to another site.

I'm assuming that making these links is job/career related.

cldrope
I think it should always be that. If you're easily addicted to watching small numbers go up perhaps you should spend your time jumping into a videogame (such as an MMO since you seem near inclined)but this is supposed to be a website for news and in the search for points people submit utter crap articles constantly.

When one ceases using the comment system as a filtering for interesting/uninteresting or relevant news and it becomes a status symbol you have completely lost the entire purpose of the system.

In the search for points you will abuse and ruin what the system was put in place to do.

iSloth
If you only ever submit your own content/projects then it defiantly is more than just a number :)

Submitting other peoples content would probably mean less to someone over time.

jnorthrop
After 500 points. At that level you can vote down worthless comments. Beyond that the number means nothing.

On the flip side it's been interesting to observe the reservations people have for voting something of interest up. I've posted stories and made comments that generate discussion but receive no votes. It's weird that people obviously read the comment or story, find it interesting enough to generate their own comment, but don't acknowledge that with a vote.

Why wouldn't someone vote a comment of interest up if karma has no value? It's an odd part of our human psyche. The unfortunate part is that voting is the sole method a site like this has for identifying the signal through the noise yet a large portion of the community is reluctant to participate.

warmfuzzykitten
There may be a simple, mechanical reason. I think there are quite a few people like me, who browse HN by scanning down a number of pages opening interesting subjects into new tabs until a considerable reading debt is built up. Why do I do this? Well, I do it everywhere it's possible, so I don't have to change context and wait for pages to load every few seconds. In addition, if you try to read each article when you encounter it, the HN page will expire before you get to the More button!

Consequently, when I read the articles later and find an especially worthy one, I sometimes try to page back in HN and vote it up. Frequently I don't find the story before I lose interest in the process. I could search, but a number of HN linkers have rewritten the title - a practice I know PG doesn't like, but people do it anyway - making search from the original back to HN more difficult. Lame excuses, perhaps, but I'm not likely to change my reading habits.