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Being inundated with techcrunch articles is just a symptom of the real problem: there's no cost to submit articles, and there's potentially major karma in being
by silentbicycle 16y ago
Being inundated with techcrunch articles is just a symptom of the real problem: there's no cost to submit articles, and there's potentially major karma in being first to submit an article that other people will also submit. Therefore, some people will submit anything they think others will, just to be first. These duplicate submissions also upvote the articles, pushing out better ones.
One option would be to make submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment. I suspect the quality of posts on the frontpage would improve overnight, as interesting posts wouldn't fall off the frontpage within an hour, drowned out by gossip.
- yeahsure 16y agomake submitting posts cost a few points karma, as an experiment Love this idea.
- HardyLeung 16y agoThis won't weed out TechCrunch submissions because they are usually upvoted above average. But the idea of charging against Karma is sound -- inferior submission incurs a certain "collective" cost to the HN audience and hence must be paid for. Only downside, as many have mentioned before, is that this turns the focus to Karma.
- silentbicycle 16y agoPart of their upvotes are implicit submission upvotes, though. While not all their upvotes, it often gives them the 10 or so they need to actually stick on the front page. I don't think it'd turn the focus to karma too much (does anybody really care about karma?), but it would almost certainly improve the signal:noise ratio.