Item — HN Reader

I would not go so far as stop awarding those karma. It gives people the incentive to post those stories and its not that just by posting one gets some karma. It has to be liked by the community. But the quantum of karma per post should ideally be less than that for a comment.

Karma seems more sought after than I thought. It seems there is almost a viable market for it. Shudder

2 comments

Indeed, people are here seeking karma for its own sake. That's the problem.

It's also the reason why every single techcrunch article get submitted here. There was a time where you'd see maybe one TC article a week come through, usually with discussion as to whether it was really worth being here.

Realistically, maybe half a dozen articles per day are high enough quality to even be submitted here. The fact that we're seeing thousands each day is a sign that standards have fallen drastically. Removing the incentive to post things unless they're really good would go a long way toward improving the signal to noise ratio.

Your comment made me think of a scheme where a post automatically incurs a tiny negative karma, which can be compensated and exceeded by the karma awarded by the community. Right now we do not have any dis-incentive for posting noise. It will make posters think twice.

However karma has to be made a float as opposed to an integer. I am curious, do downvoters get a tiny hit for downvoting ?

I agree there should be a cost for posting stories, even going so far as preventing further submissions if you fall below a certain threshold. You could raise your karma back up through commenting.

I'm seeing a lot of cases where someone writes a small post to their site and posts it as a story (or even a comment!) on HN just to get publicity for the site. So it might not always be purely for karma.

Though I'm pretty new here, so this might be 'normal'.