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The price of one karma point is upper-bounded by the cost of making it yourself. Since you could just create a sock puppet to upvote yourself (assuming newbies
by limmeau 16y ago
The price of one karma point is upper-bounded by the cost of making it yourself. Since you could just create a sock puppet to upvote yourself (assuming newbies may vote -- haven't kept track of the catalog) in a minute, and the minute is worth $0 (because HN is a sweet waste of time), one karma point can't cost more than $0.
However, the price isn't linear. You can't boost yourself by a million that way because PG would notice. So million-point karma packages could actually have a nonzero monetary value.
- rms 16y agoCreating a sock puppet and upvoting yourself is against the secret HN rules. Please don't do it. Sock puppet karma points are worth negative karma.
- limmeau 16y agoSelf-upvoting is at least bad style. I'm not advocating to do it, just trying to estimate the minimum price if one wants to get karma somehow. As for negative karma, does HN actively detect sock puppets to punish them?
- rms 16y agoCreating an account to upvote yourself is against the rules and HN has sock-puppet detection software that is not fully published in the open source release of news.arc. Reddit similarly has sock puppet detection software... all social news sites beyond a certain size need software like this or things like the home page being taken over by internet marketers happens.