7 ms·

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.