Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it? Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an in

Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it? Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an insightfull comment) but there aren't that many opportunities, and it establishes competition for a good thing, having fresh news on HN. You also tell that the referred mechanism would be gamed by people who would post old pg essays. Then again your scenario is wrong. The mechanism can be implemented to work so that the PG essays as not enough for the demand of points. And if you tell me that people would post other things just for points, isn't that the whole point of the voting/karma system? There are problems, but I think the karma system is not obviously broken. It's true it's hard to create the right incentives to fight those problems. But HN has done it so better than everyone that I'm confident it will get better soon. On a side note, has anyone ever tought of dynamic partitions of the community to address the problems of exponential grow and dissolution of identity?