6 ms·
Ask (meta-)HN: zero points on a submission?
At the time of writing this submission :
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374169 :
has 0 points. I thought submissions:
a. started with 1 point, and
b. can't be down-voted.
I've checked with another post and the votes don't seem to go down when you flag an item (don't worry, it needed to be flagged) so that isn't it.
So it appears there's another mechanism at work - does anyone know what it is?
Thanks.
(edited for typos and added the comment about flagging)
- cperciva 16y agoPeople can obtain a votes-don't-count flag but still submit new stories; if this happens, stories they submit start at 0 points. How philh could have obtained this flag, I'm not sure, but I believe PG has said in the past that there are several automatic spam-detection mechanisms and they're not all infallible.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoAh - that's very interesting. Thank you.
- philh 16y agoI don't appear to have that flag: votes I've made (both on comments and articles) still show up using a proxy in incognito mode while logged out. I noticed yesterday that one of my submissions (I think it was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373034 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373034) was on 0 points according to my "submitted" page, but on 1 from /newest. My first guess is "something to do with caching", but I don't know.
- cperciva 16y agoYeah, caching is also entirely plausible... there have been a number of caching-related glitches over the years.
- pmichaud 16y agoThis gives me an idea actually. What if submissions actually did start at 0, costing submitters 1 karma to submit? It would have a chilling effect on submissions that would bias them toward stories that are obviously suited to HN, since a submitter would want to get back at least the point he lost. Also, it would prevent brand new accounts from submitting, and skew submissions away from newbies and toward veterans of HN, since vets will have significantly more karma. That means people who know what HN is and have been around HN for a while would be more likely to submit than the other people who aren't clear on the guidelines and cultural norms yet.
- jacquesm 16y agoMake it 5. Or even 10. And wipe the karma slate clean for everyone so old timers don't have an unfair advantage.
- arethuza 16y agoMaybe have a fixed number of submissions accepted per day and have people bid for acceptance?
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoMy first visit here was in response to PG saying that I should submit something. Your scheme would prevent that. Perhaps people should get sponsored, and the sponsor shares the first few karma points/hits. A newbie submits something, and an old-fart - sorry, long-standing contributor - can offer to sponsor it. There are loads of schemes, but all require work, and all will have unintneded consequences. Yes, things could be better, but they could be worse. Nostalgia these days is not as good as it was ...
- jules 16y agoJust let users start with 2 karma.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
- jacquesm 16y agoI've seen a few of those in the last few days. There was another phenomenon like that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369294 No links at all, you could only upvote it.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoWhat if karma was gone? How strange to pursue points that have no intrinsic value, cannot be spent on anything, and mostly reflect how popular your opinion is and not its thoughfulness.
- jacquesm 16y agoUpvotes on stories are useful, upvotes on comments less so I think. After all, the homepage is a 'scarce resource', but comment threads can be long without any real penalty and voting doesn't make them shorter.
- gjm11 16y agoSpace in a comment thread is also a scarce resource, or rather readers' attention is. I would find HN a much less pleasant place to be if (say) every comment thread had exactly its present content plus an equal amount of dross. So if scarcity on the home page justifies karma for stories, I think scarcity of reader attention justifies it for comments. (No, voting doesn't make the threads shorter, but it does make it easier to identify comments that are more likely to be interesting and to skip ones that are likely to be rubbish.)
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoI guess my point was, most often downvoting is used to express disagreement, not lack of value. Which leads to a uniform, digestible content. But some of us don't mind thoughtful alternate opinions. Good luck finding them here.
- gjm11 16y agoFWIW I've seen here a fair number of opinions I agree with and a fair number I disagree with, both thoughtful and otherwise. Also FWIW, it seems to me that comment scores have enough correlation with interestingness to be useful, and that the sort of discussion in which this is least true is also the sort that least belongs on HN. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
- pg 16y agoThe process that created the item died before the submitter's vote for it was registered. This can happen when the server gets restarted or when a temporary spike in load makes processes time out. I don't make the combination atomic because correctness doesn't matter super much.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoAh. OK, thanks. An interesting insight into one of the design designs, and even more interesting that it almost exactly mathces one of mine in our commercial system. Nice.