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Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points?
- lutusp 13y agoI think you may want to define "legitimate" in this context. Obviously your karma isn't that of another person, and particularly not someone who wants to buy an HN account.
- dotcoma 13y agoWhat about robbing a bank?
- mooreds 13y agoSeems like bad karma to me.
- krapp 13y agoWhy would someone want to buy it?
- mkr-hn 13y agoSome people care about accumulations represented by numbers. I don't understand it either.
- krapp 13y agoI would even imagine most really high-karma accounts have probably already been linked to a known real-world identity. There isn't a pm system or any private content in user accounts so even nefariously selling access to someone else's account isn't likely to be of value to anyone. Although I guess that depends on what you would consider 'high' karma. If it's just anything above the threshold for downvoting then maybe having a force multiplier for that might be worth something to somebody. Still though, I wouldn't pay money for it.
- tokenadult 13y agoAs a heuristic, if you have to ask whether or not it is legit, the answer is probably no.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- niico 13y agoI bet if you dig in Silk Road you can find someone selling it.
- opminion 13y agoTry to reason from first principles: karma is a property of a HN username. A username is attached to a human identity, even if not enforced. Karma is used to predict future quality of that human's posts based on previous posts, and for it to make any sense it must be assumed that past quality is a predictor of future quality. Changing the human behind the karma breaks those assumptions, so it is a way of misleading the site's users.
- ScottWhigham 13y agoThe only "legit" reason I can think of that would make someone say, "I'll pay you for that user account" is that they are a spammer who wants to be able to submit links that get around the various automatic account controls in place (that prohibit accounts below a certain karma threshold from creating posts or commenting too frequently).
- bbissoon 13y agoOn HN, karma is a commodity. You've put the time and effort into growing your karma legitimately and if you don't have a problem - why would anyone else. Think about it, how do we know this isn't the person who bough it having doubts about the purchase?