HN Explorer

Ask HN: Can we do a karma reset?

4 points by HNKarmaReset ↗ HN
The high karma accounts are not always smart people, usually they’re incredibly immature and clearly lacking in experience.

Often, an account like this will post a comment demonstrating they have no clue what they’re talking about, and when someone even lightly corrects them what happens? They immediately abuse their power with heavy downvotes and sock puppets they can easily promote with their heavily weighted votes.

This is a shit-for-brains cliquey strategy that makes the site worse than it could otherwise be.

What would it take to do a 1-time karma reset (or has it already happened)?

It could be a way to save the site, otherwise I fear people will eventually jump ship.

The site format is fine, UI/UX, etc. but a few bad apples here spoil the whole bunch and they are multiboxing accounts like crazy to shape the narrative in highly personal, egoic, selfish ways that hurt the site and content just to comfort their ego by giving them undeserved authority.

4 comments

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rvz
Unfortunately there's not much you can do here and it is not going to happen despite HN being in fact far worse today than it was a decade ago.

The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled and now we have slop filled posts in Show HN and some instances of crypto memecoin scams.

Things would have to get significantly far worse (spam, AI agents, constant rule breaking) for a reset with new rules. It may happen, but we are not there yet.

srean
> The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled

Can you tell us about how do you know this

uberman
Do you have proof for you claims? I am under the impression that 500 rep essentially maxes out your standard privileges and that no reputation based weighting is applied to votes.

If your fear is that there are voting rings (which apparently the system tries to detect) then resetting the rep will give them more relative power not less.

Personally I dont pay any attention to the rep of a user when evaluating how I should or should not engage with them. I think things are working just fine at the moment.

If you are frustrated by repetitive homepage content, I recommend you switch to the "new" view as there is lots of diversity there.

Again, if you have any proof that a cadre of nefarious high profile users are somehow abusing the system I would love to see it.

nacozarina
I agree with your observations, but my conclusion from it is therefore karma isn’t worth worrying about. Not uncommon for me to see heavily upvoted material I disagree with, or vice-versa, and am resigned to the fact that bot traffic will be a significant factor on both counts. I still get to view both. Unlike reddit, it seems unpopular opinions still have a home at HN. Karma is mostly for the bots, not me.