5 ms·

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

by raquo 16y ago

Vivtek 16y ago
That wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.
- bmelton 16y ago
  Amen? Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone. For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles. So, the scenario would be like this: - new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission. - If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit. - If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit. There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
  - silverskein 16y ago
    The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time. So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
    - bmelton 16y ago
      Well, the hope would be to reduce the signal to noise ratio, so, in the event that something less popular comes up, it should have more time to be seen and appreciated. I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.
      - knowtheory 16y ago
        Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;) Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again. What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community. But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up. There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
        bmelton 16y ago
        I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry. The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach. If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions. Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.
BCM43 16y ago
The problem with this is what it will do to the comments on the article. There have been many times where I have an idea for a comment that I know will get me karma, but I don't think that it really belongs on HN, so I don't submit it. Since I don't have that much karma, if this system was in place I very possibly submit the comment so I could submit more articles later.

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

by raquo 16y ago

Maybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.

Vivtek 16y ago

That wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.

bmelton 16y ago
Amen? Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone. For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles. So, the scenario would be like this: - new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission. - If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit. - If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit. There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
- silverskein 16y ago
  The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time. So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
  - bmelton 16y ago
    Well, the hope would be to reduce the signal to noise ratio, so, in the event that something less popular comes up, it should have more time to be seen and appreciated. I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.
    - knowtheory 16y ago
      Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;) Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again. What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community. But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up. There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
      - bmelton 16y ago
        I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry. The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach. If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions. Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.

BCM43 16y ago

The problem with this is what it will do to the comments on the article. There have been many times where I have an idea for a comment that I know will get me karma, but I don't think that it really belongs on HN, so I don't submit it. Since I don't have that much karma, if this system was in place I very possibly submit the comment so I could submit more articles later.