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A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post

• franze 14y ago
  I don't care about (HN) karma, and i believe (a.k.a. untested hypothesis) most HNers don't care about it. In conclusion i don't think that adding / subtracting something most people don't care about will solve ... anything.
  • zizee 14y ago
    Presumably part of the change would be that accounts with 0 karma would not be able to post? Perhaps the grandparent could elaborate.
    • alttag 14y ago
      Yes, the OP explains that positively voted submissions would be necessary before voting.
      • zizee 14y ago
        Apologies, thought that this was an "Ask HN thread" and missed the OP article.
  • Indyan 14y ago
    I don't care much about karma. But, I do care about having the freedom to post stuff that I find interesting. Now, I am assuming that most of the noise will be either from new members or from members with low karma. If they are penalized something like 5 karma for submissions (and they can't submit if they don't have 5 karma), then that will both passively and actively discourage spamming. A karma threshold can also be applied to new users to encourage them to first participate int he discussion and understand the ethos of HN. Edit: I want to clarify that I am in favour of deducting karma for new submissions. The comment system is already fairly balanced thanks to the option to downvote. What I am suggesting is essentially a mirror image of the parent article.
  • laurencei 14y ago
    i think the idea is more like stackoverflow - where your points (karma) gives you access to certain things. If you have 0 karma - you cant comment. If you have low karma - you want to 'save' your posts for valid comments that are likely to get upvoted, thus giving you more karma to make more posts etc. i.e. people who post 'crap' and get continually downvoted will eventually be silenced.
    • steeleduncan 14y ago
      I think that HN already has Karma thresholds below which you can't downvote (or change the colourscheme!)
  • ed209 14y ago
    I do care about karma. I care because it's a measure of whether what I say is agreeable or disagreeable. It's not about fitting in or following the herd, but if I say something that loses me karma I want to understand why. Maybe I'll end up with the same opinion anyway or maybe it teaches me to think more before I talk. Mostly, karma helps me reflect on my opinions and question those opinions. The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they downvote_ If you agree with me, then an upvote with no commentary is fine. If you downvote me, tell me why. Maybe I could learn something, maybe I get the chance to explain myself better, maybe an open disagreement on a point enriches the community.
    • alttag 14y ago
      ... And much of the time, I think asking for a comment with a down vote is a good idea. Except, there are obvious trolls. Or someone else has already explained why the comment was inappropriate. It happens enough that the reason for the downvote seems—to me—facially clear ... so while I agree it's a good courtesy in most situations, I don't think enforcing it would help. Maybe a UI change could encourage this behavior (e.g., highlight "reply" on downvote), but this loses some of the clean look of HN ...
      • prodigal_erik 14y ago
        Maybe if it's out of band somewhere. If comments are not worth reading (IMHO the purpose of downvoting) I would usually prefer not to plow through subthreads explaining why.
    • EzGraphs 14y ago
      Despite occasional complaints from users being down-voted, I have appreciated that in most cases when a user is down-voted and asked for an explanation he is given it.
    • DanEdge 14y ago
      The only thing I would do with HN is to _force people to comment when they downvote_ How do you prevent a: 'Downvoted for being moronic->No, you are' kind of thread?
• mooism2 14y ago
  Comments with so little value that they get downvoted already cost the commenter karma. Most posts that have not reached the front page yet do not reach the front page at all. Comments on pages that do not reach the front page have much less opportunity to receive upvotes. This proposal risks discouraging comments on submissions that have not reached the front page; since some submissions only reach the front page because of the comments, this would harm HN.
  • bryanlarsen 14y ago
    You also don't want to penalize comments on articles that have dropped off the front page. They're useful to people who get to an article through Google. These readers are much less likely to be logged in and thus, much less likely to upvote.
  • badclient 14y ago
    Surely that can be addressed by weighing comments differently base on the position of the post or the number of page views etc.?
• TomGullen 14y ago
  How about giving more weight to upvotes from people with more Karma. I'm not sure if all upvotes are currently equal (I suspect they are).
• bencevans 14y ago
  Wouldn't that mean there would be loads of crap posted to HN rather than just crap comments?
• rlt3 14y ago
  The problem, as with all great communities, seems to be the abundance of new users and, thus, the widening of scope on submissions and comments. To me, it seems obvious that to improve HN, the community needs to stop expanding as much and get its main user base back to a niche. The only tried and true method (that I know of) would be to follow Something Awful and start charging for an account. Something trivial, like $2, would be fine. Of course, this will never happen. This isn't really something I want to happen, but, to me, it seems to be the only way of limiting the user base in an effective manner.
  • abailin 14y ago
    Although what's $2 for a site that I check every day?
  • sgdesign 14y ago
    Why not just have optional pro accounts that people can get for a fee? "Pro" tags would be a quick way to make "serious" posters visually distinctive.
    • rlt3 14y ago
      I feel that this creates elitism. Anyone can buy a 'Pro' tag. What makes a person's comments, who is willing to spend money, better than one who is not?
    • Spearchucker 14y ago
      I think that brings up new problems, e.g. dealing with someone with a paid account/subscription that submits enough posts or comments to get that person banned or hell-banned. Or a scenario in which a hell-banned user wants to upgrade to a paid account.
  • verroq 14y ago
    I disagree, it has to be something substantial, at least $10. The more you charge, the more value it has.
    • 14y ago
• shin_lao 14y ago
  The downward spiral feeling comes from after reading HN for a while, you start to reread the same articles and same comments. It does not mean HN gets worse and worse, it means you extract less and less value.
  • leeHS 14y ago
    I'm relatively new to HN, and also learning to program. I don't comment much. I rarely submit. But I read pretty much everything, including the comments. And when I see posts about improving HN, I must admit that I just don't see it. Yes some comments are not constructive, but you'll always have that. I'm surprised we don't have more of this to be honest. So is there a correlation between time spend on HN and your personal view of it's quality? Good question. How do you measure quality then? How do you separate yourself out?
  • danso 14y ago
    I thought the negative perception was due to the effect of nostalgia for old times, but this is an even better explanation. Everything is exciting and more stimulating at first, that's how the brain works. Of course after a few years, that feeling of freshness is going to be lessened, even if the actual overall quality is better.
  • ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    I couldn't agree more. Also, there are plenty of run of the mill "news" articles from tech crunch et. al. But there are still more than plenty of interesting programming/hacker articles and nuggets of goodness posted.
  • ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I feel like this is closer to the root cause. People start out and everything is new, and they have this huge sense of wonder about what is going on around them in the valley, and then after a year or two you realize that bigger picture moves more slowly, a lot of people re-invent the wheel, Etc. But the conversations are actually nearly the same quality, they are just re-hashes of conversations you already know the answers too. Sometimes you'll get someone who is quite disgruntled from the it and that will be a pain until they stop but for the most part it seems to be ok. That said, if every submission only had one comment 'see link to previous discussions of this form' that would be pretty boring too.
• silvestrov 14y ago
  It is difficult to restrain users from posting too often when creating new accounts are free: how do you compete with free? You can't make it worse than creating a new account because then the users will just create a tons of new accounts. So somehow you need to make account creation "more expensive" to be able to have a working cost/rate-limiting on posting.
• da_n 14y ago
  I think this could possibly work if HN was a paid-to-post service, even if it was just $1 p/m. The only problem I can see otherwise is this would open the possibility of an underground currency for karma. It might result in user accounts who exist purely for karma collection, getting upvotes from droves of dummy/spam/bot accounts, then posting spam. It would be possible of course to try and detect this, but not trivial I would think to avoid false positives.
• kghose 14y ago
  I think we should concentrate on 1. Submitting better articles 2. Upvoting better articles 3. Posting better comments 4. Upvoting better comments 5. Add to the signal 6. Stop worrying about the noise
  • johnleppings 14y ago
    This approach didn't work for Slashdot, Digg and Reddit, which are all fallen civilisations. If we don't try anything new to solve the problem, this civilisation will fall as well.
    • javery 14y ago
      Reddit actually has extremely high quality subreddits - it is just the main tags that have degraded.
      • Kilimanjaro 14y ago
        Reddit's front page look like neon lights of a cheap brothel, how can we know there is a great experience waiting for us in a dark room?
        • xyzzyb 14y ago
          Because it's as easy as going to a subreddit (r/linguistics is pretty interesting). It's a free and open website: the barrier to entry is practically non-existent.
• jre 14y ago
  An alternative solution would be to hide (by default) posts that have no response and that have been made by users with karma below a certain threshold. It would also be possible to compute the average number of upvotes for each comment thread and show the threads with the most upvotes first.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    An interesting idea. I'm not sure how well it'd cope with vote rings.
• alttag 14y ago
  One of my frustrations about the perceived downhill spiral (as a relative newb, having been here just over a year) is all of the proposals for improving HN which keep making it to the front page, and inevitably spawn the same set of suggestions in the comments.
• mikecane 14y ago
  I wonder how many people here have from time to time pointed to one of their own posts? You'd see that HN has a longer tail than just the one-day front page most people think it has. And this is true for submissions that get many votes as well as for those that get none. So thinking you know what people want is nonsense. You just know what you want.
• tokenadult 14y ago
  From the submitted blog post: "I have a suggestion for improvement: it should cost Karma to comment, and when your Karma drops below a certain threshold you can no longer comment. "My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the sake of saying something and collecting Karma." I agree with the rationale for the proposal here. The bad comments are the comments that pg described in 2011 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 as "comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted." No one should be upvoting a comment that the current author refers to as "trash comments [that] are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into them" because such comments fit the definition of comments that are both mean and dumb. If you see something that is mean, absolutely downvote it. It's clear that our site founder and most veteran members of the HN community (and all of the most thoughtful members here, however recently they have joined) don't want any meanness or kneejerk criticisms here, so download comments like that ruthlessly. That's upholding the guidelines. Dealing with comments that are dumb (in pg's words) or have little thought put into them (the OP's words) is a bit harder, because if I don't have domain-specific knowledge, I may not know what comments are dumb. Wikipedia has its own problems with lots of dumb content, so often looking it up on Wikipedia will only add stupidity to HN. But in threads about subjects I know about, I try to scan for comments that point to reliable sources (that issue is crucial) and otherwise show signs of thoughtful research before posting. Then I upvote comments that I know for sure to be polite, true, and informative (well, I try to do that routinely here anyhow) and I downvote comments that are shown to be dumb by the context of the discussion and reliable knowledge of the world. We can all do the same, if we can upvote or downvote at all. Some users with accumulated karma can also flag comments that violate the site guidelines. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (To flag a comment, follow the "link" link text next to the comment, which takes you to the specific URL for the comment, and there you will see a "flag" link if flagging is enabled for your user account.) Basically, every moderation problem on every forum (I have been a forum moderation on one forum or another since 1993) involves someone being willing to take out the trash. It stinks to have to take out the trash, but someone has to do it. If you have upvoting power, upvote the good. If you have downvote power, definitely downvote the mean ("kneejerk criticism") and downvote the dumb ("thoughtless") to the degree you can identify it. If you have flagging power, go to the extra effort of comment-specific flagging for the especially bad comments. But most of all, upvote the good. I have a slogan that I tell my children to help develop their social skills that "no one ever receives enough appreciation." So be generous in upvoting good comments, to drown out the bad. And thanks for agreeing with pg's statement from last year http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696 that both comments that are (a) mean and comments that are (b) dumb shouldn't gain karma, but rather lose it. P.S. I see from the other comments in this thread that there is confusion about whether the original blog post, which has the title "A proposal for improving HN - it should cost Karma to comment" is about submissions of new articles or about comments to submissions by others. That appears to be related to the submission title here, which is "A proposal for improving HN : it should cost a user Karma to post" as I type this about an hour after the blog post was submitted as a new submission here on HN. I am only talking about comment rules in my reply here, not about submission of new article rules.
• kwamenum86 14y ago
  Have to disagree. This has already been mentioned elsewhere but comments with little value are already penalized when people downvote them. If you notice more crap comments that aren't being downvoted that's because a) the community standards are changing and b) there's no good way to penalize all crap comments anyway - some will slip through the cracks. And as a result of b) great comments will slip through the cracks, which means people will lose points needlessly even when they're not trolling. I'm not saying your proposal wouldn't have an impact on trolls. But there would likely be an awful lot of collateral damage.
• lathamcity 14y ago
  I thought the main problems on HN were -Linkbait articles rapidly accelerating to the front page while good stuff like questions or Show HN gets lost in "New". -The slight trend in the community towards vitriol and nasty criticism, which there was a lot of chatter about two or three weeks ago. In both cases, in my understanding, there's a lot of upvoting of the controversial links/comments from new people with low karma, which is how they're kind of taking control of the community. I came up with some ideas in the shower about this. First, I thought it might be a good idea to create some logarithmic mapping of karma value to vote weight. The weight wouldn't give the user more karma for being up-voted by a high-karma person, but it would factor into the site's systems. That way, people with more karma have more of an impact on the community. Second, I thought that the quality of a user's previous submissions should factor into their reputation or something on this site somehow. Maybe HN could look at the trend of votes earned on recent comments and the ratio of downvotes:upvotes or downvotes:views (since controversial comments get upvoted a lot, we want to look at how many times they were downvotes, not the total score since that will probably be very positive regardless of how many downvotes there were) and use that information to somehow affect the user. i.e. if someone is getting a lot of upvotes for mocking someone's project in a nasty but particularly clever way but also getting a considerable number of downvotes, the system should say hey, this guy writes posts that a lot of people don't think belong on our website, and then take action on that somehow. Note, I'm "new" (198 karma, joined about a year ago) so I may not know what I'm talking about.
• shanelja 14y ago
  I get frustrated when I post a massive comment on an article which never gets read, I don't believe it would add to the environment of the website to have it cost me 'karma' also, it would effectively take away my inclination to comment on new topics. I do care about Karma, it's how I know I'm doing a good job, that regardless of my opinion, people agree with my reasoning and the argument I've put forth, I put thought in to my posts, not just posting for the sake of it and it would be a shame to see that go to waste by being penalized before I've even had the chance to be heard. This aside, I believe that HN doesn't need improving, I'm a long time reader and it annoys me when people seem to see some kind of downwards trend in the content, it's a news aggregation site, in essence, so perhaps this "downwards trend" people seem to be observing is merely the winds changing direction in terms of news. HN has always been start ups, HN has always been popularity contests between brands and programming languages, the fact that it seems to be consumed these days by Apple-Samsung etc, is because that is what is in the news at the moment, eventually that will change to some other dominant topic and people will claim they are sick of seeing that too. As I said before, this is a news aggregation site. The sum of all the content in a particular genre is the overwhelming majority of content on here. That only changes when some other trend starts to emerge, until then we have to wait. For the record, I for one am also sick of reading about Apple-Samsung, but I'm more than content to sift through it to find the quality content which exists on here (not that the content isn't quality coming from Apple-Samsung, just that it is fairly monotonous now.)
• bluedanieru 14y ago
  Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back and see if you still feel that way. One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit.
  • Jyaif 14y ago
    off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?
    • brudgers 14y ago
      The original definition of "hacker" before it entered the media.
      • hackinthebochs 14y ago
        But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
        • irishcoffee 14y ago
          Only people who have some hipster-like affinity for the term I think. "A rose by any other name..."
        • 14y ago
• sigzero 14y ago
  Why? When an article is bad it can be down voted appropriately.
  • omarchowdhury 14y ago
    Just like comments that demonstrate the writer is not lucid.
• Claudus 14y ago
  I have been reading HN for years, and I disagree with the premise that there is a "downward slide". For people like me, it might be helpful to provide some sort of evidence to support your claim. The solution you are proposing also would silence users accounts permanently without any chance for redemption, those users would become disaffected and resentful, and with the trivial nature of account creation here, might cause new problems. HN is a community, and I think a system that promotes corrective behavior (like the current one) works best when it exerts negative social pressure for "bad" posts and helps new users integrate themselves into the community. If you've ever seen the movie "Hackers", the character "Joey" is a total noob, and the other characters are constantly giving him negative feedback when he does something stupid, eventually he learns a few things and becomes more useful.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• ForrestN 14y ago
  If everyone who made a big pronouncement about HN's sad demise instead submitted a great article, went through and up-voted every story and comment they thought was interesting, and left some thoughtful comments, we would probably be in much better shape.
• cubsink 14y ago
  A small question, how can you even increase the karma if you have no ability to post? I think this is a bad idea and I haven't noticed a decrease in the quality.
• crusso 14y ago
  I propose that HN hold a contest a la Netflix whereby identity-sanitized user activity is made available for various parties to run algorithms on in order to improve the general quality of comments and articles. Basically, the contest metrics would be: * Given ALL identity-sanitized user activity -> Predict the average voting behavior of individual users. I've watched online forums deteriorate for almost 3 decades now. It's a shame to see HN following the same pattern of trolling, populist reputation seeking, post-spamming, account spoofing, and just generally immature behavior.
• thedeuce 14y ago
  It would be the biggest douchebag move in history.
• nicholassmith 14y ago
  The people who leave comments that spoil hacker news don't care for karma, they'll just sock puppet to get their way. I don't think there's an especially large issue here, bad comments get down voted to the pits anyway. Plus getting a down vote is often useful to help keep in the community guidelines.
• lignuist 14y ago
  I think all these approaches lead to elitarism and blackhat KEO tactics (Karma Engine Optimization). Maybe a form of the pretty common the-forum-used-to-be-better-syndrome? :)
• markmm 14y ago
  I am new to HN and I think the board's post are high quality compared to some other boards. One issue I have is that it can be too serious and void of humour. I assume the blogger of this article needs to lighten up a bit.
• sageikosa 14y ago
  I often make comments specifically not intending them to be discussed. Some of those might be interpreted by some as sniping a discussion board, but I don't see this as a discussion board, but a comment board with replies. And I take some pride in being able to condense my thoughts and get my point across without detracting.
• joelthelion 14y ago
  How about restricting voting to users with more than, say 100 karma?
  • phreeza 14y ago
    Maybe something like this is already secretly the case, at least for comments?
• forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  Oh, this is the European approach to startups versus Americans: Make it super difficult to create your company(or post a comment) so only good companies will be created(or good quality comments posted). Right? In the real wold if you make risk threshold too high, new people do not enter because of fear. That is the reason most of the tech startups in the world are Americans. In Europe investors will require you to have a degree, if so they will ask you for your experience, if so they will ask you for your business plan, if so they will ask you for market research for your b.plan, if so they will ask you for profits you already have, if so...why the hell I need you if I already have all that?.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• iand 14y ago
  Am i missing something? If it costs karma to comment and you have no karma, how are you supposed to earn enough to start commenting again?
  • talmand 14y ago
    Not that, how are you supposed to comment the first time? I guess a new signup gets 10 karma or something. But then if your karma is reduced to a certain threshold and you can no longer comment, how are you supposed to build your karma back up to comment? What's stopping this bad apple from just creating another anonymous account? It's not like you're losing money if your HN account becomes useless.
  • epo 14y ago
    Well, you could acquire it with the passing of time. Say for those with a karma below 25, they get 1 point a day until they reach 25.
    • ballooney 14y ago
      People (like me) often sign up initially because they have something to add on something right now (a space-flight article (my field) in my case), and rarely because they anticipate being moved enough to comment in 25 days. This proposed mechanism would especially preclude contributions from the people whose content is being featured, which you often see ('hey, author here, thanks for the interest...' etc) who sign up just to answer questions about their blog post or the bit of software they've authored that has got to the front page. To me this stuff has often has higher value than 80% of the comments from career commenters, just by virtue of the SNR to the discussion at hand. It would be a disservice to the community to preclude it, I think.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    Also, OP says > I have a suggestion for improvement: it should cost Karma to comment, and when your Karma drops below a certain threshold you can no longer comment. HN already does almost this. If I post a lousy comment people will down vote it, and I will lose karma, and if my karma drops below a certain value I will no longer be able to comment.
• sumone4life 14y ago
  Interesting idea. Instead of simply saying people can't post if their karma is too low you could take the users total Karma relative to 0 and add a sorting feature filter that sorts based that. Only problem is new people would get buried pretty quickly and it may feel like they are trying to get someone's attention from across the room while in the middle of a pack of screaming monkeys. Adding a sort by "new" feature could help new users get their voice heard and voted up or down accordingly. Just a thought.
• e03179 14y ago
  Some HN members know other HM members in real life. You have business or personal relationships with others that also read, post, and comment on this forum. Some of you have never met any other HN member in real life, but do consider some HN members as friends and acquaintances. I, on the other hand, have met none of you and don't carry on a virtual relationship with any other HN member. I consume your news and up-vote articles that I want to see more of on this forum. And on rare occasion I will post a comment. All that said, besides PG, I absolutely don't care what the USERNAME is of the original poster. I do scan the front page to see if there is any article is an extraordinary number of POINTS or COMMENTS. POINTS and COMMENTS are probably 75% of the reason why I click on a link of the front page. And the more comments a link has, the most likely, I will click on the COMMENTS thread before I even read the article. 25% of the time I will click on a link because it contains a keyword (to include the URL snippet) which is in regard to something I care about.
• epo 14y ago
  Metafilter is on of the very few internet forums which maintains high quality. It costs you $5 to join and if you abuse your membership you will have your membership cancelled without refund or appeal. It is actively moderated by 'staff' who delete egregiously off-topic posts (and their followups) and you can't post new topics for a week after joining. Some of this doesn't apply to HN but penalties only work if they hurt. I mean who cares about losing karma? It only appears when someone checks your profile and it confers no advantage whatsoever (that I know of, perhaps I don't have enough). And really, isn't some of this just people getting old who should have moved on? Like your grandpa going to the bar he frequented years ago but complaining about all these young people and their loud music. Perhaps the complainers should reflect that HN is no longer for them. What are cost free impediments to trolls and spammers? Impose a time delay between joining and being able to reply, and a longer delay before being able to post new topics.
• mistercow 14y ago
  I think the karma penalty for commenting is not a bad idea, but I think taking away the ability to comment is untenable. As others have pointed out, it's too easy to game by making a new account. A possible alternative would be to take away voting privileges if the karma score drops too low, but even this should be done as a local drop rather than a global one. Otherwise, established members with lots of karma can slide into mediocre commenting without penalty. However, if you take away voting privileges for losing karma too quickly, then new users must not be able to vote. Otherwise, once again, it is simply too easy to create a new account when you lose your privileges.
• jcr 14y ago
  On the bottom of every page is a clearly defined link for everyone to make whatever "Feature Requests" they want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 The owner of this site, pg, helpfully provides that thread for feature/meta discussion, and kindly requests for feature/meta discussion be placed there. If you had searched for and read all of the previous meta discussion on potential HN features, then you'd know your suggestion has already been proposed many times and debated to death in near endless variations. The only important question is why you decided to ignore the polite request of the person who created and pays for this site with your attempt to grab attention for your feature request proposal? You probably had good intentions, and were overly excited by your idea, but you just didn't stop to do the needed homework and think things through completely. Don't feel too bad, everyone has "Fire Aim Ready" moments.
  • marknutter 14y ago
    I've been here for a few years and never noticed that link. I think the OP can be forgiven for having missed it.
  • steeleduncan 14y ago
    I have never seen this, thank you for pointing it out - I will use it, but to be honest this is precisely the kind of valueless bureaucratic comment that irritated me enough to write the blogpost. This is an internet forum, not a hashtable; uniqueness is not a design requirement, conversation, discussion and thought are, so I intend to have many more "Fire Aim Ready" moments. If I think about something strongly enough I will write about it, often post it and if people are interested enough in it, they will discuss it. I'm sure most ideas problems and potential solutions have been mentioned somewhere in mankind's 4000 years of written words, but context changes over time and many conversions are worth having as many times as necessary before a problem is solved.
    • DanBC 14y ago
      So you are part of the problem - repetitive content - that you seek to eliminate? The suggestion you made was also made over 1600 days ago. The problem you claim is new was happening before you joined! Maybe the hints and tips for new users could repeat every couple of months? Sorry for grumpiness if this post sounds grumpy.
• zedzedzed 14y ago
  The public forum should follow democratic ways... I dont like the idea of costing karmas, when in such public forums, one have full right to speak freely for free...
• sycren 14y ago
  I don't want Hacker News to turn into Quora.
  • landonhowell 14y ago
    I don't think adopting a piece of someone else's best practices would.
• teflonhook 14y ago
  stupid idea.
• agumonkey 14y ago
  I often wish HN turned into a child of c2.org wiki. I won't complain as I don't have the brain or knowledge to help much in the matter.
• nik61 14y ago
  I'm a great fan of HN, but since some 'ill-judged' remarks I made about someone or other I got some negative Karma that I can't get rid of. So if this proposal went forward I'd never be able to post at all.
• justjimmy 14y ago
  This was discussed a while back as well http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842554 And my thoughts "Here's an idea: Have karma and voting tied together. Your Karma is basically how much votes you get to give. If someone makes a good post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma. The person made the post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote other posts. We can limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way they can vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality articles/posts. Now it works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too, thus making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action will cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without thinking. Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote positive contribution and dissuade useless contributions. The tricky part is balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons votes/karma from the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes into the system. Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10 votes each month. But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must first contribute enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100 upvotes to your posts/contributions)."
• robomartin 14y ago
  For the most part HN is far from being in decline. I say this from the perspective of going back to very active participation in various lists back in the days when USENET and private BBS's were your only choices. I've seen a lot, the good, the bad and the ugly. I do feel that some tweaks here and there could be useful, and I suspect that this is happening on a somewhat regular basis. My own pet peeve is that down-votes ought to cost you something and that down-voting should require a comment. Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not pollute threads too much. We are all guilty to some degree of adding pollution. This is a group of human beings, not algorithms. It will happen. And this is normal. As a libertarian and real working entrepreneur who has founded and run several companies, succeeded and failed, I tend to react negatively to very liberal views and views not necessarily rooted in real entrepreneurial experience. On the political end, some of the younger minds on HN have been politically polluted by the liberal bend of our universities and mainstream media. Until they have a collision with reality they then to simply parrot what was driven into their heads because that's all they know. On the business end, there are a lot of people posting on HN that have never actually started or run a real business, leased space and equipment, hired and fired, had to deal with the various corrupt liberal labor boards, had to deal with taxation and regulation, the agony of business problems and the exhilaration of business success and a myriad of other real-world forces that a business has to face on a daily basis. Yet, they'll come to HN and think that because they read the internet they understand business. All of this is OK to some degree or another. As I said, it's human nature and this is a group of human beings. I like HN and want it to remain a high-quality source of interesting discussions relevant to the tech entrepreneur (and not just about which LISP is better!). I'll do my part and try to refrain from reacting to some of the aforementioned posts unless I can truly add valuable insights. Maybe others should also take a moment to re-examine their behavior patterns and see what could be improved. It's probably that simple.
  • thebigshane 14y ago
    Down-vote comments could be hidden by default so as to not pollute threads too much. I really like the idea of private comments for this case. Wild tangents, pedantry, grammar/spelling corrections, personal questions, (constructive) criticism could all be optionally made private and avoid clutter in the threads
• pmelendez 14y ago
  This is interesting but I am concern that people with no enough karma to post would abandon the account (because would be useless at that point) and starting creating new ones. Or worse, as they could have dummy throwaway accounts for potentially risk comments in which case this mechanism would not achieve its goal of getting better quality post. However, I think it still would be possible to do something similar, like proportional weights for upvotes and downvotes depending on the karma. Also weighting your posts with your karma could help making to grow faster those posts coming from a reliable user. We could go even further, making the karma as a rating instead of a linear accumulator and update it using something like an Elo rating system where we could compare the actual score (upvotes points) with an estimate prior score based on the actual karma (pretty close to what happen on chess actually) I don't know.. I am just writing down some crazy ideas that came to my mind when I read the post. Any insights?
• DanBC 14y ago
  Many of the comments on the "Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone 5 design" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487905) were disappointing / annoying / frustrating. I am being the change I wish to see by not commenting in threads like that. Visiting NEW and up voting great stories, and flagging garbage, helps. Maybe.
• nkohari 14y ago
  My Hacker News account is 1859 days old (just over 5 years). Over those 5 years, I've gone through several stages of my entrepreneurial career. HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company, and finally joining a friend's startup as CTO. I've changed throughout, and I've seen Hacker News change as well. The problem I have witnessed with Hacker News is that over the years, it's transformed from a place where civil and intelligent discourse can be had to a place where each comment seems to be made for show. Rather than making solid arguments, each person seems to want to be seen as more intelligent than the rest of the commenters. This phenomena is the reason for what in my opinion is a breathtaking level of pedantry about the most mundane topics. For example, there was a post on the front page yesterday about scalability at GitHub. It was an interesting and insightful article from a knowledgeable author. The top comment was something along the lines of, "I can't believe they wasted so much time making the UI look this good." HN used to be a place where insightful articles were rewarded with intelligent conversation and debate. What happened? Another example. Someone launched a site earlier this week involving the sales of hobbyist electronics. The site was definitely interesting, and they experienced a large volume of traffic from HN and Reddit. The top comment? Something along the lines of, "when a startup can't keep its site up, it makes me question their abilities." HN used to be a site where you would be congratulated for launching. What happened? It's this kind of stuff that has to go. I don't think Hacker News was ever perfect -- and maybe I'm just rooting for the site because of the potential that it has -- but it's definitely gotten worse over the past few years. As a community, we need to stop the posturing and the pedantry, and get back to civil and intelligent discourse. We also need to act as the site's immune system, and stop promoting content that is clearly written to be seen but adds nothing to the conversation.
  • think-large 14y ago
    I am new to Hacker News. I have to say that I too despair at some of the comments posted on the site. I believe that open discourse and communication is great, but when someone posts in jest it belittles what we all desire from a community like this. I find myself filtering comments on HN. I still go and read them (as opposed to Reddit where I don't read comments), but this is a location where comments should be meaningful and less of the "Herpty Derp" we get on YouTube. I don't believe HN is comparable to YouTube, but at the same time I can see where content in comments could be improved. I would be in favor of a system that taught new recruits to listen and watch the community before commenting, much like what this article suggest.
• dschiptsov 14y ago
  It should cost a user Karma to down-vote and up-vote.
• utopkara 14y ago
  Why is karma any significant to the quality of a post? It already costs enough to create a post (in time and effort); if that doesn't have any effect on the quality, it is not clear why an additional cost in karma would make a difference. HN is not a personalized news feed. If a story has been upvoted sufficiently to float up the ranks, that means there is sufficient community interest in the subject. Given the way HN works and the size of its audience, there is simply no way you can magically fix the posts to fit a particular definition regarding the topic, quality or the tone without strict monitoring; and if you do add admins, etc. that wouldn't be HN anymore.
• rdl 14y ago
  The main way I'd improve HN is more aggressive moderation of stories -- there are just many which often lead to bad comment threads. Either bounce them off the site entirely, or lock/hide/prevent comments on those stories (like on some job posts). Right now, the first page of stories are all "good", but often there are 50%+ bad ones. The other thing would be some way to coalesce multiple stories on the same topic into a single entry -- when Steve Jobs dies, it's nice to have a front page post, but no real need to have 30 of them.
• ionforce 14y ago
  All this will lead to is gaming the system by trying to post material which will gain karma, i.e. currying the favor of the majority, vs posting things that are legit interesting. It will bury gems and minority opinion.
• chaffneue 14y ago
  Really all I feel we need to regulate is the blatent keyword/SEO spam and link bait from various online publications. Other than that, I find most of the content on HN hasn't changed all that much from a couple years back when I started reading. There's already a flag button on the interface, but perhaps some kind of spam score or feedback system would help the community point out misleading articles and marketing efforts. I don't know if registered users in the community are the ones from which to demand karma unless they're known to post such links repeatedly.
• enraged_camel 14y ago
  One (major?) change I'd like to see is requiring the user to post a reason when they downvote something. This would not appear as a reply to the post itself, but rather be available for viewers in a pop-up box when they mouse-over the post. I think this would really solve the problem with rampant downvoting of things people disagree with (as opposed to downvoting low quality content, which is what it's supposed to be for).
  • gruseom 14y ago
    I suspect most of the reasons given would be "fdshjfdsf".
    • enraged_camel 14y ago
      It would relatively straight-forward to filter out bogus input like that.
• grandalf 14y ago
  There are always ebs and flow. The community is less niche now than it was a few years ago, so naturally the ratio of stores on the front page to stories I choose to read has gone down a bit. But I still find that there are many exceptional comments and so even though I now consume a smaller percentage of overall daily content than I did a few years ago, I don't think the quality of the content I consume via HN has gone down at all. There are occasionally threads that appear to have no interesting comments in them, and those are usually the sort of vapid, TechCrunch stories or tabloidesque personal interest stories that many of us find annoying. For what it's worth, I also find it annoying to read weak technical blog posts written by people who are clearly just trying to generate blog traffic and don't really have anything interesting or motivated by a real startup problem.
• overgard 14y ago
  I have no opinion on this, but I do have a meta thought: I wonder if the "quality" of posts is the wrong way to frame the discussion of trends about a community. As an example, it's linguistically like describing an activity as "fun": it means a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. For instance, the "fun" of having dinner with friends is a lot different than the "fun" of a roller-coaster, but we use the same word for both even though we're really talking about very distinct emotional states. Same thing with "quality", maybe we shouldn't just talk about if posts are better or worse, but rather what trend they're moving towards (if they're moving at all). I havent been there in years, and I only ever lurked, but I felt like slashdot came close to getting this right, in that you could rate the qualities of something on various axis (ie funny/insightful/interesting), which made scanning the comments really easy. If I didn't want snark I could skip over that easy enough, whereas if I was in the mood for it I could just go all out reading that. If I were to notice a trend, I would say the site has moved from being a little bit more positive but echo-chambery, to a bit more critical/negative but with more diversity of opinions. I have no opinion on whether that's better or worse, it just feels like a shift of tone to me. If I were to make a criticism of hacker news though (and it's a minor one -- I'm still here after all), it's that this community is maybe a little too self-serious, out of a terrible fear of becoming redditesque.
• lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Over the past few days I have had (mostly) intelligent conversations with people I have never met on JSON, DNA testing in 40,000 years old bones, Scottish independance, and salary needs of contractors. I simply cannot imagine doing that anywhere else. And I doubt that any of my comments rate as insightful or beautiful. Yet stopping me making them would have killed those conversations. I can agree that the submissions seem less interesting than 5 years ago, but the conversations engage me as much as ever, which is fine - HN has changed - it has become more necessary to participate - it is not wikipedia - its not supposed to be a passive read.I have been a lurker here longer than my username, and in the past year it has been noticeable that HN is more like a conference - the interesting stuff happens talking to people in the corridors. My 2 cents suggestion - hashtag comment threads. Then the best comments, most insightful, most summarising, can be extracted on any given hashtag subject - a living FAQ if you like. But don't make huge changes - the real stuff is about talking with other interesting people. Thats great - lets not risk it with big unproven changes.
• swalsh 14y ago
  This raises the risk of posting even higher. As it is now, if your average comment karma falls below 0, your account is secretly perma-banned from posting. If you're at -1 karma by default, the amount of people who become "secretly perma-banned" will increase significantly. I'm sure that will improve some comments, but I feel we also will most certainly loose out on good posts in the future.
• jmsduran 14y ago
  Personally, I like the idea of an "HN playground" of some sort: a series of mirrored HN sites, where each attempts to implement and test a different/new community mechanic. Whether it be having to spend karma in order to post or some other scheme, I think it certainly would be interesting and allow people to tweak and provide feedback at a more massive scale.
• deveac 14y ago
  A thought on requiring Karma to post: What is the point? Looking at it, the idea implies a requirement where a scarce resource is depleted in order to contribute. The hopeful goal is that quality of contribution goes up, since you are spending a scarce resource. In order for this to matter at all and drive behavior, the amount of that scarce resource required to be spent must be significant enough to matter, -or non-trivial (what that amount is I don't know, but that is immaterial). Here is the problem: While the goal is changing posting behavior for the better, this system might have unintended consequences that have the opposite effect. Users may just start posting lowest common denominator (Hacker News version of it anyway) posts in order to just snag upvotes so that they always have plenty of karma to post. Essentially, it could encourage "karma-whoring" posts, and comments across the site could devolve in the aggregate if this behavior is adopted in any significant amount. We all know about certain other social sites and the kind of chaff karma-farming brings in. HN mitigates this my keeping karma hidden among other things. This idea though, seems like a different mechanism that could easily encourage that behavior.
• pinaceae 14y ago
  To actually argue about the proposal at hand: - It amplifies the echo chamber. Only if people like and agree with me, I'll get points. Only with points I will be able to post. Loop here. - It punishes lurkers who only once in a while see the 'need' to comment. Not every comment gets up- or downvotes. Want to 'improve' HN? Instead of this navel gazing post, why not post something worthwhile?
• EGreg 14y ago
  I personally think this thread is full of great discussion. There is certainly a certain character of pedantry on Hacker News, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of feedback. Compared to a lot of other forums, Hacker News gives a lot of good feedback, and the stories on it have been very helpful to me. Just my take. I personally don't care about karma on this thing. However, I must admit that I cared a little more when it was displayed! Public reputations seem to do wonders for keeping people well-behaved.
• blhack 14y ago
  Is this where we compare slashdot ids, I mean measure account sizes I mean account ages against each other? If you don't like the quality of stories on HN, you can change it. Go out and find/write good content, then peruse the submit button.
• zerostar07 14y ago
  We should be able to invest on articles with our karma and get dividends when others invest. How about we add article karma options for posting to certain time windows? We could even start lending some karma, then wrap it all and bundle them as sub prime loan backed securities. Let's call it operation karmageddon
• yxhuvud 14y ago
  I think that this would be a better solution to people submitting new articles. Set a cost for submitting new articles and spam bots will have a lot harder time. EDIT: Reformulation.
• andrewljohnson 14y ago
  I think part of a perceived drop in quality is that the older forum members have been there, and done that. I caught a glimmer that HN might be getting good again the other day. There seems to be a surge in article about how to be an entrepreneur, while balancing family, new children, and a real, adult life. Those topics are much more interesting to me these days than articles exhorting me to get things done.
• ta12121 14y ago
  There is no objective system that can deliver guarantees about subjective quality.
• lnanek2 14y ago
  Unfortunately, most people vote up what they agree with, not what is useful. I don't want to come to a site to read a bunch of mild wish washy comments by people only saying nice things many agree with, that's a waste of my time.
• dgunn 14y ago
  I'm not sure how submissions like this are still showing up so commonly or how they arrive at the top of the list. If ever there was a community of people capable of solving the problem of "improving HN", this is the one. I supply a problem statement and solution below. Problem: HN has problems which seem not to get fixed despite recommendations made to the maintainer(s?). Why? I suspect it's because maintaining HN is one of the lowest priority jobs to the maintainer of HN. The guy is busy! Fixing problems or implementing possible features quickly would have very low ROI to such a person. This isn't to say that he(they?) doesn't care - just doesn't have time because his other responsibilities are actual responsibilities, not a hobby. This is the equivalent of hiring an independently wealthy person to work for your company. The person may really like working for you, but you can't rely on them. They have little incentive to stick around if they get even slightly bored. Solution: Make a new one. Someone make something better. You know where your primary audience lives (here) so you know where to find users. Monetize it in some way so that I know you'll keep working on it. Make it your full time gig. With the number of users you could get, you wouldn't have to ask for much. A donation model would probably pay you a pretty good salary. Be nice to the community and make reasonable attempts to fix the issues they bring up. They'll probably even help you fix them if you need them to.
• EdiX 14y ago
  > This way comments with so little value to the community that they are ignored completely or just downvoted would reduce the commentator's Karma If a comment gets downvoted the user already loses karma on it, does it really matter if you award one extra karma penalty point? And given that downvotes are free above the threshold I don't see how a comment that adds very little value would not get downvoted by someone, I think that comments that get no downvotes and no upvotes aren't inherently malevolent. > My reasoning is that the trash comments we all hate are kneejerk criticisms with little thought put into them, which I suspect are largely made for the sake of saying something and collecting Karma. If collecting karma is the reason they are made not getting any upvotes would already be a deterrent, no? IMHO this suggestion makes no sense, all it does is deter people from posting on long threads, because few people tend to read those and posts there often end up with no upvotes or downvotes, and to comment articles with many comments, because the pages after the first one are effectively inaccessible. But I also think that Hacker News has been improving in the last year, so we probably disagree. What I would fix is the "new" page, which is getting filled with trash and too fast moving, decoupling submission karma from comment karma would help. Requiring a minimum comment karma to submit entries would help a lot too and it would single-handedly kill spambots too.
• Xcelerate 14y ago
  One trend I've noticed is that my best posts (which normally take 10-20 minutes to write) get much less of a response than witty one-liners.
• forrestthewoods 14y ago
  Any solution relying on karma is doomed to fail imo. Karma is easy to min-max. I've gotten good at it. Only ~1200 karma but I'm averaging over 10 per post. It's easy with a bit of practice. None of my comments are particularly good. They typically express a mostly safe opinion in a mild manner. I don't like to make non-root posts as they rarely get upvotes and I hesitate to post in a large thread (like this one) as it's easy to get buried. I don't even know why I post this way to be honest. I was mostly just curious to see how high I could get my average. The bar to get upvotes on HN seemed really high at first and I wanted to be a good poster. Now I see the road to karma is paved with safe, fluffy comments.
  • stcredzero 14y ago
    I will corroborate this, from the POV of someone who has been here a long while. (> 13000) Commenting and downvoting has gotten less thoughtful around here of late. I especially note that there's a lot of knee-jerk downvoting by people who seem to read carelessly.
  • zerostar07 14y ago
    Wow that is very insightful. I 'm surprised that even here people are willingly conformists to gain acceptance.
    • forrestthewoods 14y ago
      I think it started with the 500 karma requirement for downvoting. I wanted the ability to downvote so I min-maxed my comments to get there quickly. After that trying to increase my average is just a way to see if I'm improving. I don't view it as conforming or trying to gain acceptance. It's more like a silly game. It does have potential value as it's good practice for interacting with the media and making company blog posts.
    • sliverstorm 14y ago
      Don't be. People conform everywhere, all the time. HN isn't that special.
• nirvana 14y ago
  It should also cost a karma to downvote someone else, maybe two. Upvotes would remain free. This way downvote might go from "I disagree with your well reasoned contribution" to "this person isn't contributing to the discussion."
• pg 14y ago
  You can test how well this would work by collecting a corpus of whatever sort of comments you think HN could do without, and then checking to see how many of those commenters would have run out of karma using whatever combination of initial karma and cost to post you have in mind. I'd be open to experimenting with charging karma to comment if someone did a study of that type and showed that it would work. (I realize it's not a perfect test, because people would make different comments if they knew comments cost karma. But that is a desirable direction to have error in.)
  • timtadh 14y ago
    I think it would be good to do a targeted posting rate eg. 30 posts per hour[1] or something of that nature. If last 20 min when regressed predict under 30 posts in the next hour it should cost 0 karma to post. However, for every post/hour over the target rate should cost the user some karma eg. karma_loss = floor(alpha*max(PREDICTED_RATE - TARGET_RATE, 0)) where alpha is a tune-able "cost" constant. The posting page should of course warn the user of the karma loss and confirm that they really want to post. [1] 30 posts/hour stands for whatever target rate you want EDIT: it occurs to me you could apply a learning algorithm to learn what alpha should be based on experience of what yields the closest posting rate to the target rate. you could also reward people for posting when it gets slow.
    • jerf 14y ago
      Don't forget second-order effects. Your proposal encourages people to post quickly, to try to get in before the costs start kicking in. Encouraging people to crank posts out faster is probably not a net win. I've noticed that trying to engineer communities isn't entirely unlike trying to secure software. You're not defending against straight-line attacks, you're defending against a hostile adversary with more time, resources, and collective brainpower than you, who will actively react to any move you make. The miracle is that any community ever works at all/any software is ever secured at all.
  • wonginator1221 14y ago
    I think that there's also a chance that charging karma for a comment could also alter the quality of discussion here on HN. Although it may reduce comment "spam", commenters would have a stronger incentive to follow popular opinion to ensure that the cost of posting a comment is recouped. This could potentially reduce the number of dissenting (yet still intellectually provoking) comments. This hivemind mentality is a major problem in many online communities, but I do think that the hiding a karma on is definitely a step in the right direction.
• solnyshok 14y ago
  hmm, to fight noise, make every char and click count. If you want to upvote, give up one karma point. Downvote? Minus one point from you too. And, finally, daily word limit, so that people give couple of thoughtful and conside comments.
• charlieok 14y ago
  I like the custom filters http://hnapp.com/ http://hnapp.com/ provides. I have one that sets a point threshold stories must pass before they show up in my feedreader. If the signal/noise gets a little too low, I raise the threshold. Works for me :)
• steve8918 14y ago
  I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards. I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum. Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most topics stay on target. If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are: 1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately if it starts to degrade in quality. 2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24 hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread, and leaving with impunity. 3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.
  • snogglethorpe 14y ago
    > 3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page. I use the HN RSS feed, with Google reader; I never look at the HN front page ever. This works pretty well for me; I can very quickly skim though all new articles, and those I've seen are gone (but I can mark those I want to come back to later as "not read").
• floatingatoll 14y ago
  I'd rather see it cost karma to upvote/downvote. Higher cost for articles, lower cost for comments.
• fjorder 14y ago
  This is actually a pretty bad idea because it would discourage people from commenting on anything but the top posts on the first page. Commenting on something interesting that's 3 pages deep would basically mean throwing away karma unless that post manages to get up-voted, which is never a sure thing. Of course, some good discussion is often what gets good material upvoted! This change, while it might improve comment quality, would drastically impair the upvoting process.
• nhebb 14y ago
  I only have one wish for improving HN: randomly rotate the top comment. As it stands, the discussion usually veers off into a meta discussion around the first comment. At the time of this posting, the thread is 14 hours old and has 239 comments, so even if HN'ers agreed with me on this point, the odds are they will never see it.
• anamax 14y ago
  One change has been an influx of people who propose improvements. Another is an influx of people who care about karma. Who, exactly, isn't going to post something because doing so will cost them karma points? (Hmm - maybe discouraging karma-whores is a good thing,) Or, are you thinking that folks with too little karma wouldn't be allowed to post? Since karma can be earned by clicking arrows, that's not much of a cost.
• olliesaunders 14y ago
  I’d like little avatar pictures next to poster’s names. They are much easier to recognize quickly and introduce an extra level of accountability and identity to posting. I wonder if the reason this hasn’t been done is because PG is too busy or it would significantly increase server load.
• finalcut 14y ago
  I realize I'm pretty late to the game on commenting here. I don't comment often. I've been on HN for 1558 days and have a karma score of 7. But here are my thoughts. I use reddit for entertainment purposes (for the most part) and I use HN for educational and inspirational purposes. That was why I started using HN and it is still why I do. Sure, as the community has grown, there have been more comments that add no value - but they are just more obvious now. It isn't that hard to ignore them and to find the meaningful or useful comments. On the surface the "cost karma to post" idea sounds great - it certainly wouldn't have much effect on me - but I agree with the various others who think it would discourage unpopular but still very useful and (at times very correct) comments. If the price to pay to get a well rounded discussion is the presence of vapid commentary - then I'm willing to continue to pay it.