HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why not make people pay using karma points for each submission to HN?

7 points by amichail ↗ HN
Moreover, when you sign up, you would have no karma points and would not be able to submit anything to HN until you accumulate enough via comments.

You can take this further by providing different prices for various initial point scores of a submission say from one to five with five being five times more expensive than one.

8 comments

[ 122 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] thread
PJGNasty
Microincentives are great in theory. I agree. I haven't seen them successfully implemented in this context (though you could compare to an ebay seller rating).

You would think someone would have figured out an effective method of user-generated content quality control.

bdfh42
Seems like an unwelcoming system for new users when (I assume) what you want to tackle is the very small number of spam posts.

A bad side effect could be that HN users might be reluctant to post interesting items that were only likely to appeal to a minority of their fellows. Technical items on web development rarely get more than three or four up-votes and yet many are likely to be of interest to web based start-ups - part of the core HN target group.

Does not feel like a net win to me.

DanielBMarkham
Aside from wondering where you get all of these ideas, why not make it more exciting than that? Make users bet karma points on the likelihood that other HN'ers will upvote what they submit.
lacker
Well, since you already get karma points for upvotes, if you charged karma for the submission it would essentially be the same as a bet.
makecheck
I wonder if this wouldn't work better for voting:

Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce "knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.

eru
Use a fractional system. Half a point spent for each point you are able to vote. Otherwise you will have deflation.

(And a little inflation should not hurt too much. We have a lot of inflation on HN right now.)

BearOfNH
This would certainly cut down on the number of poll responses, and those pesky "Vote up if you like chocolate" comments.