Item — HN Reader

The credit thing is my only real concern here.

As far as I'm concern, upvoting/downvoting isn't fun, it's an act of public service. I'd be incredibly concerned that corporate entities will have huge incentive to buy fact-upvotes and since there is no limit how many they can use, it would take 5,000 good samaritans to undo the damage of 1-shill with $5.

Basically a deal-breaker to me that the site is that out-of-touch with the problem of internet news. Frankly, I'd like a news site that does the opposite - 1 vote per proven US citizen (no bots, no foreign influencers, no corporations).

1 comments

It seems like the bulk of your concern is about the voting specifically. I'm curious if the voting aspect of the credit system were removed and voting worked more like it does on Reddit/HN (one vote per user), but the other aspects of it were left intact would that alleviate most of your concerns?

Specifically, it would still cost credits to leave comments, submit stories and facts, but not to vote.

I mean, I don't imagine I'd "pay" to leave comments, submit stories, or facts.

Maybe I'm an odd-breed but I see HN as a charitable place for those in the know to contribute to the pool of public knowledge.

I think the best version of HN (or equivalent) is full of people with that objective (e.g. wikipedia). The worst version is full of people grinding emotional axes (4chan) or self-promoting.

I think you'll find the people who are self-promoting (e.g. trying to start a new cryptocurrency, or a PR firm) will have much more resources to submit articles than good-samaritans.

The thing I do like is breaking an article into a list of cited facts. I like the brevity, and I like sources.