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Ask HN: Reward users for early upvotes?

8 points by RickHull ↗ HN
Reddit has the Knights of New -- who take it upon themselves to curate the queue of New items. I don't believe there are any systemic rewards for such action or participation.

My suggestion is that the first person to upvote an article from 1 points to 2 points, when the article is subsequently upvoted by (say) hundreds of HNers, should get rewarded for bringing it to attention.

The person who upvoted from 2 to 3 should get somewhat less of a "reward". The person who upvoted from 999 to 1000 should get epsilon.

This is just the seed of an idea. It could take many forms. I'm sure it has been proposed before. Links to previous discussions entirely welcome.

9 comments

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minimaxir
This would not work because there is no limit on upvotes. It would therefore be advantageous to just upvote a lot of random posts. And then if many people do this, it breaks the voting system entirely.
RickHull
Good point. Though this particular pathological behavior could be controlled for fairly easily... others surely exist.
allendoerfer
Multiply the reward a user gets with

  1 /( n_upvotes_user / (n_upvotes_all_users/ n_user))
Or use a more elaborate function than mean, maybe median.
dang
The challenge is how to measure the quality of what gets upvoted. We don't want to reward all upvotes, only ones that identify the best stories for HN, as defined by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
allendoerfer
Multiply the reward by

  (1 / (flags_post / (flags_all_posts / n_posts))) * (1 / (downvotes_post / (downvotes_all_posts / n_posts)))
dang
Can you define these terms? I don't understand what they mean exactly.

At first glance, this expression looks like a positive number, meaning you could still get a reward by upvoting everything. If we ever roll out something like this, it has to not be possible to write a bot to gain karma—except, of course, by writing a bot the identifies the best stories, in which case you deserve it.

allendoerfer
Sure. What I wanted to say is just, that you can create a measurement for low-quality posts through dividing the number of flags and/or downvotes the post got by the average number the other posts had had. Take the inverse of that product and you have a nice factor that approaches 0 for low-quality posts and 1 for high quality posts.

I chose a simple example, but of course you could use a more appropriate statistical method, apply a logarithm afterwards or just choose a threshold and reward only posts with 0.9 to 1.

Edit: I just realized I made a mistake. Of course, posts do not have downvotes. Flags would still work, but to a lesser extend, I guess. There has to be another method to identify low-quality posts. Maybe some measurement based on the number of comments, their upvotes and so on. That would get really complex, because these metrics again would have to be ungameable.

S4M
You could get something like 10% of the karma of an article if you upvoted that article before it reached the frontpage and that article gets more than a certain threshold (say: 100 points, which would somewhat mean that the article is good. That way you get some of be benefits of the submitters, but not all. A bit like being an early employee at a startup.

However, people could just upvote all the newest articles without reading it and get the karma from the ones that end up scoring well, so that system wouldn't be perfect.

brudgers
The reward comes from writing good comments. Writing good comments early on good articles tends increase that reward. Rewarding early upvotes would just encourage voting rings.