4 ms·
Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?i
by wheels 18y ago
Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129). So it seems a little silly to get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things.
More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend. Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites.
However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better.
- davidw 18y agoKarma, above a certain level, is primarily an indication of who wastes too much time on this site!
- swombat 18y ago6. davidw 8356 Irony? We've heard of it :-)
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoThis is probably an example of the old George Carlin joke about driving: everybody that drives slower than you is a idiot, and everyone that drives faster than you is a maniac. I'm perplexed -- a top ten karma person posting that having high karma is a sign you spend too much time on the site. Do I upvote that? Sets off a recursion alert. As for "does karma matter" -- if it didn't matter, we wouldn't have it, sandwich or no. Study after study has shown that if you give people arbitrary rewards, they'll work to gain them. Perhaps there is a lesson in there for startups, no?
- davidw 18y agoI kind of liked the idea of getting rid of the 'leaderboard' and only showing 'karma' for comments... where it is sort of useful for pointing out 'hey, this is a good comment!'. Either that, or, yeah, introducing 'real world rewards' for it;-)
- mattjung 18y ago> Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world Right. But the concept is used to reward people for wishful behaviour on this site. > More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That's exactly the problem I would like to tackle with my proposition.