You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if you want. There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model.

You can also model any problem as a hydraulic circuit if you want. There are other incentives like fun, passion, and anger that will break any economic model. If HN had some internal-economy model where you were cycling around karma as if it was currency, paying upvotes into new posts to get a return back for your “early upvoting” if they do well, giving you more capital to spread to other new posters… I know exactly how the dynamics of this site would change for the worse. People just post here (free work!) because it’s interesting. How irrational! There’s some merit to the idea that you need aligned incentives. I’ll give you that. Just doesn’t always need to be directly boiled down into units of exchange.