In terms of machine learning money is the opposite of regularization. The more money the less regularization the more over-fitting to your specific self-chosen environment. A not rich person will have to learn to cope with obstacles. A rich person can remove obstacles. But it is impossible to remove all obstacles which will lead to increased hostility towards those remaining annoyances - like for example with SUVs in traffic. Calling a nice comfy SUV your owns means you removed obstacles like hot and cold weather (thanks to elaborate climate control), people literally look up to you in your SUV (big ego gains - less obstacles in terms of having to deal with disrespect), both due to direct in indirect conditions you won't have to deal with car problems. But when you are in traffic you'll also feel aloof and drive accordingly - like you own the street. But you cannot enforce it. End every so often there will be a conflict with a guy driving a ridiculous, old, little Toyota who won't give you way or won't let you zip into his lane. Now you are heated because this puny peasant isn't acknowledging your ego. And that's just one example.

Money is an insanely toxic mental, political, and social poison, for exactly these kinds of reasons.

It's also a social reward function that privileges egotism and narcissism over empathy; exploitation, scamming, and rent-seeking over creativity, curiosity and invention; and short-term gain over long-term damage.

Like the hardest of hard addictive drugs, it's an almost irresistible modifier of behaviour and attitude.

Some 2000 years ago this was already the case.

1 Timothy 6:10: "...the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."

There's plenty of creativity in tax avoidance and financial engineering.

Now, I'm not saying that is the kind of creativity you want to promote, but it certainly is there. There are many people who have fun doing this kind of work.

Then again few rich people will engage in this creative task on their own - most will probably just hire an accountant.

Actually, for the wealthy I know, finding accounting and tax loop holes is better than the Superbowl for them. They treat the activity like a Sherlock Holmes adventure.

Indeed. Plenty of wealthy people love this.

Creativity of the kind that you do not want to display on stage in a theater. Just a very small group being interested in your services, often denoted as a fraction of a percent (when natural people) or a position in a Fortune(TM) list.

I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened precurrency as well. We aren't dogs but one thing known to make them potentially more aggressive is having larger "territory" it thinks it must defend.

That was useful behavior for guard animals but not universally For vast periods of time you want them to bark at intruders, cattle rustlers and predators but not mauling small children or innocents who may leave you liable.

Essentially it may be the power that does it technically.

Good comment, except I'd point out that plenty of creativity and invention gets employed in the service of rent-seeking: e.g. most of academic economics, and the way it gets used politically.

Check out Michael Hudson and Richard Werner for a dose of reality.

It's hard to square that with the fact that the wealthiest societies are also the most free, the most liberal, that capitalism has lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last half century.

If money was a poison, the west should be dying. Instead living in rich societies has isolated us from the realities of life in the underdeveloped world, and from our own past of just a few generations, that 'first world problem' has become a persistent joke.

Money can be toxic. Look at the awful social and political problems so many petro-states suffer from. Productive work is the great cleanser though. My wife is Chinese and grew up in a hut with no running water heated by a stove. Since I started visiting her hometown in 2001 it's been transformed beyond recognition, and not by a poison.

> the most liberal, that capitalism has lifted a billion people out of poverty over the last half century.

I often hear this about capitalism, but why do same people never attribute the genocide of American natives, enslavement of Africans and Indians, to capitalism? The earliest emergence of stock companies, lay waste and devastation to an entire sub-continent.

When the sixth mass extinction is underway, ecological disaster on a global scale, and yet "it be as it be", but this is not attributed to capitalism?

Capitalism: it sits to bask in every glory, and all its failures expelled, literally explained away

> Capitalism: it sits to bask in every glory, and all its failures expelled, literally explained away

True to its very mantra: socialize the losses, privatize the gains! At least you can't blame it for inconsistency.

Also, it isn't really capitalism that lifted people out of poverty, it was a very resource-intensive exploitation of fossil fuels on an unprecedented scale.

In the scope of just 1 century, we probably burned at least ~10 million years worth of accumulated energy in fossil fuels. It would be ridiculous if this didn't lift people out of poverty.

BTW, it's not like communism didn't lift people out of poverty. Compare the wealth and possessions of an average citizen of USSR in, say, 1925 and 1975, half a century later.

I think one need to understand that those kind of things have been said about western capitalism/society for a long long time, even under appalling injustice, segregation etc. Its purpose is to comfort the privileged, not necessarily to be true.

The underlying pattern has been there for even longer of course, e.g. Bertrand Russell wrote this in 1932:

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges.

Thanks for replying. I didn’t know where to start with a reply. I wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about. Or if he lives on the same planet... And my alien is not very good.

> ...why do same people never attribute the genocide of American natives, enslavement of Africans and Indians, to capitalism?

Because:

- Slavery and genocide predate modern market economics. They are not unique to capitalism. It would need to be shown that they are more prevalent (tough, given Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.).

- The slavery and genocide you are probably referencing comes from mercantilism and imperialism, not free market capitalism.

- Slavery, violence, and murder are not features of free markets. Property rights aren't exactly established if people and land can be taken by force without compensation or agreement, not that people are property anyway.

> Slavery, violence, and murder are not features of free markets

I beg to differ. Slavery, violence and murder are inherent properties of an unjust relationships which follow from unequal distribution of wealth.

If you can show me a society which used property but did not have those effects, feel free to correct this point.

But on other hand, I can show you societies which did not have concepts of property, of trade, and did not have slavery and other forms of oppression.

If you could actually show examples at reasonable scale, I would be very impressed and maybe even go anti-capitalism.

The thing is that every system is multifaceted and may effectively have "phases" when it was beneficial and later winds up detrimental and surplanted when a better adapted solution occurs and displaces it. Take the ancient basics of kings - ruling and becoming rich on extortion essentially but a monopoly on force kept violence in check. Later warrior elites ended up losing power to merchant elites - especially with the industrial revolution. Merchants were once above only Burakumin in the Japanese caste system - they later won the right to wear one sword. I believe that writing off large debts for effective titles were involved.

Capitalism like everything else must adapt or die when circumstances change. As for attribuitable to capitalism a dirty secret is that the USSR was worse environmentally without the greed. It might excaberate some but it is fundamentally the wants and needs that drives consumption.

Haiti's poverty is why their border can be seen from space via deforestation. Humans hunted megafauna to extinction back in ancient times and they weren't exactly morbidly obese.

Ecologically the Soviet Union was the largest human caused disaster in the planet's history. More humans killed in pogroms and unnecessary famines in Soviet Union/China/Cambodia than those caused in all modern warfare.

The mercantilist form of capitalism lead to great abuses and problems, but as always capitalism is the a horrible economic system- but its better than all the alternatives.

The Spanish conquistadors were feudalists, not capitalists. Spain actually had one of the most rigid and statist economies in all of Europe. The sort of tribalism (of the European colonists) that lead to the destruction of native societies in the Americas, both North and South is it's own thing and exists independently of the economic system of those practicing it.

In fact Capitalism says very little about politics though. All it takes for it to operate is a functioning legal system and respect for property rights, and that's about it. Capitalism is simply about the freedom to own and raise capital, make investments and earn profits. That's about it. People have been doing that for thousands of years, it's simply the degree to which it is taken that makes the difference. What makes a system non-capitalist is really the degree to which freedoms to invest and practice economic activity are restricted or reserved, and the degree to which property, profits and investment can be appropriated.

Capitalism has very few ideological requirements. A such you can layer over or under it almost any other political ideology. Just look at China with it's Communist political system, statist public sector but burgeoning capitalist economic sector. Is the persecution of the Uighurs down to capitalism?

One problem with capitalism is that it makes a society dramatically more efficient and wealthy, making it a lot more capable of prosecuting whatever other political, racial, cultural or religious agenda the society might have. Just look at the wealthiest nations on earth. They are either capitalist, or they are resource rich such as the petrostates, or in the case of China have re-branded capitalism as 'Chinese Characteristics' and used it to fund the statist side of their agenda. Russia is failing precisely because it has been unable to establish a functioning capitalist economy and relies on oil and gas money instead.

Look at the middle east. Israel is easily the most capitalist society in the region and, even though it faces up to some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, if there was a war between Israel and say Saudi Arabia even, there's no doubt who would get humiliated. That's how terrifyingly effective capitalsim can be. It's the reason Japan rose from being a miserable medieval backwater to dominating all of Asia, even though it retained it's feudal hierarchy. That's how flexible capitalism is because it's not really an ideology, it's just about basic economics.

The double standards, lack of historical context and nuance, the surgical separation of capitalism from the power concentration it creates and its consequences (inequality, skewed democracy etc), the euphemisms (usually using the word freedom), and the reflexive assumption that critics want Stalinism and so on, all these things are just too infuriating and requires too much effort to step by step reply too, hence my downvote.

Slavery and genocide didn't suddenly appear at the same time as capitalism as you and I would recognize.

Capitalism means free markets. Free markets means freedom to buy, sell and invest. Freedoms must be protected, and the freest markets have the strongest protections for person and property. Freedom and security go hand in hand.

If capitalism is responsible for slavery and genocide, then it's also responsible for eradicating slavery and genocide within its sphere.

Alternative economic systems don't magically promote human rights. Let's discuss the gap between rich and poor in China or Cuba. Or ethnic suppression and genocide in the USSR or China. Or endemic racism in Cuba. Or systematic impoverishment of millions of people in oligarchies across Africa and South America.

I'm still waiting for socialist systems to make a billion people freer and happier, instead of dead, impoverished or imprisoned.

> Capitalism means free markets.

No, it's a model of property rights. “Free markets” are a slogan, but not even a particularly coherent concept much less a concrete thing that is present in capitalism.

There has never existed a "free market" in the libertarian ideal sense; markets are only able to exist under the system of a government.

This response sounds like "there has never been communism under real communism ideal sense", lel.

yeah, it does sound a bit like that, but when you factor in the reasons why a free market has never (and in my opinion should never) exist there starts to be a difference. Things like regulatory capture, monopolies, and exploitation of any possible resource are all systemic effects of capitalism. When capital (power) begets more capital (power), it should be no surprise that tactics that are underhanded but ultimately grant more capital (power) are the ones chose and that the system tends towards a consolidation of power in those that have more of it already. It's not saying anybody with money or power will automatically do those things, just that the system is set up to encourage that, so somebody probably will at some point.

To me, it's similar to looking at a voting system like first past the post and identifying that the system tends towards two parties as a fundamental nature of the system. Underlying motives and strategies of individuals within the system will produce this effect.

I'm not commention on the validity of the "no real communism" statement here, just the comparison of it to the "no real free market"

Here's the problem with your reasoning, via an example. American prosperity is as much an outcome of capitalism as poverty, repression, and murders in Central America are.

You see, capitalism indeed works great for the people who "win", yet to keep a relatively high standard of living at home (I'm talking about America since it's the wealthiest country in the world), much suffering has been inflicted in other faraway places: labour is exploited, natural resources are pillaged, brutal control is effected, either directly or by more dissimulated means... This is what people don't talk about then they mention the "joys" of capitalism, they don't mention the repression and murders in Guatemala and dozens other countries, they don't mention slavery and the genocide of natives, they don't mention how multinationals exploit resource-rich countries and siphon that sorely-needed wealth back to the privileged West, etc.

Don't forget exploiting future generations at home and abroad. It'll be the ultimate irony if we become extinct due to our own greed.

> American prosperity is as much an outcome of capitalism as poverty, repression, and murders in Central America are.

ANY sort of inherent human greed capitalizes on suffering. It doesn't magically disappear with another system. There is always a pareto distribution of wealth. The differences are in which metrics are the primary leverage for accumulation and the scale of the differentials (wealth disparity) along the curve.

Was capitalism responsible for the wars waged in that region by the Aztecs? Was it responsible for the massive losses of life in the USSR and Mao's China? You can't just say that because X country is capitalist, everything that happens in it is because of capitalism. It's just an economic system, that's all. Projecting it's effects beyond the realm of economics requires some justification.

Capitalism didn't originate the concept of resources, or politics, or even money. How can you justify blaming Capitalism for things that happen just as much, if not many, many orders of magnitude more in non-capitalist societies?

Conversely I think it is justifiable to attribute the enormous economic gains of that billion people to capitalism directly. It's an economic system and we're measuring economic gains directly attributable to investment, often replacing decidedly un-capitalist systems.

I'm not sure you can call what is in Central America actual functioning capitalism. A random individual in that area can't easily raise capital and start a business. They are subject to extreme levels of crime and cronyism. A lot of Central America is more like a set of fiefdoms with a king rather than what would reasonably be called some kind of western capitalism.

Consider your favourite successful startup and move it to Central America. Now consider what additional factors it needs to take in to simply operate. Take security as an example: Private guards acting with high aggression (machine guns) are a basic requirement in some areas. Compare that to New York (Hand gun).

It's not a reasonable comparison.

>I'm not sure you can call what is in Central America actual functioning capitalism.

You're missing the point. The United State's functioning capitalism is a major cause of your hesitancy to call Central America's countries functioning capitalistic societies.

capitalism turns this motivation to accumulate more than others (greed) into a drive to produce goods and services. This has good and bad qualities, and focusing on one or the other doesn't paint a complete picture of its effects. This mechanism also breaks down in some ways when you can generate money without providing anything, which is becoming more prevalent nowadays.

'Trying to do the right thing' is a quirky human heuristic that works well in the small but scales terribly. It is evidenced in things like the legal system where 'intent to commit a crime' is often a consideration in the sentencing in addition to the actual outcomes of a criminal act.

With that in mind, it makes a lot of sense why money (and the economy generally) rubs people the wrong way. We have here a powerful system in which if you act rationally, selfishly and with intent to maximise your personal outcomes (but within the law), others will benefit. Intent is explicitly not part of the equation of who gets to be wealthy. But the whole thing hangs together because of the intuitive fact that a clever person acting with selfish intent can usually do more good than a clever selfless person acting with noble intent.

There is an irony that working to maximise your income looks, in real terms, a lot like dedicating your life to the betterment of others with personal perks. The people who get rich under capitalism do not spend their time sitting in idleness.

That sounds very much like the trickle-down argument, which has been proven false – if not directly harmful – many times over. Selfish behaviour run amok more often leads to rent-seeking and a stockpiling of resources at the top, with little benefit to the rest of society.

I would imagine the road rage comes more from insecurity. Feeling like a doofus for driving an SUV, and being triggered by someone that's clearly not as insecure.

This might sound odd, but there is some real health benefits in perceiving oneself as having high social status. A few of those are better immune system, successful aging, lower stress hormones, lower risk for illness and depression, faster recovery, and just general higher energy and confidence. It can have a very strong positive effect on ones social network. It is a very powerful and deeply biological aspect of life.

Looking at research and listening to experts in this fields, it is really fascinating how anything can be made into a value system for social status. Not only that but we can participate simultaneously in multiple social circles with completely different value systems, and as one researcher put it, we tend to channel most of our self worth based on the system where we are ranked highest.

Strangely, money seems like one of the hardest method but also one of the most effective method to achieve this.

My intuition tells me the internet social status doesn't provide the same health benefits than real world social status for people who have not much of it.

It would make for a interesting study, but the example that I heard in one lecture on multi social groups was a janitor (low rank work position) gaining health benefits from being the leader of a chess club. I view it as completely plausible that Internet social points to be very similar to that of chess club social points.

That said, perception can quickly change and it very possible that the distance that Internet has makes it more vulnerable to collapsing. In an other lecture on stress it was pointed out that few things cause more harm than when false hope is found to be misplaced, so it very possible that if a individual perceive themselves as high ranked only to be proven wrong, then that can cause major health related issues. It was something that stress studies found out the hard way.

The op was referring to perceived status for example I used to work at a former "proper" civil service telecoms company in the UK.

Because of the inherited status of M&P grades most of us where quite happy to take our toil - though this depended on your family's status as well.

No, GP was specifically talking about HN karma https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643427.

I think it's generally assumed that more money equals better physical health, but the psychological aspects are very underrated.

Money equals certainty for a lot of people. It lets them count on certain things always being there. Having your own home, respect, clout totally builds your confidence and lets you face life with positivity. You can afford to be wrong more often, so you don't mind sticking your neck out - sometimes you lose, but often times you win big. In short, money removes a lot of anxieties.

A poor person simply doesn't have these luxuries, and the anxiety of poverty is a killer in its own right.

Our flavor of capitalism is also such that all the wealth ends up in a small number of hands. The winner takes all. I wished we could somehow enforce equality without negatively impacting innovation. Probably wishful thinking, but I wonder if society can be optimised so everyone can feel prosperous at the same time?!

I wouldn't be surprised if the levels of inequality are negatively impacting innovation. There has to be an optimum level but I don't think we are anywhere near it in the Anglo-sphere.

Oh, that's a given. Your instinct here is right.

Has to do with society functioning as a genetic algorithm: look into a-life like the work of Danny Hillis. You don't make gains when one 'solution' dominates over all others, that's called a plateau. Currently we're at a very low plateau where meddling with finance instruments or collecting rents of various kinds is the only effective way to wealth, and where most innovation will just get you broke and out of the game, because the risk of failing is far too severe.

In history we've had far better conditions for innovation (for instance, the dawn of personal computers) when people were generally more well-off but the disparity between extremes (Gini) was far smaller. This wasn't true for all populations, but I mean the populations that supported technological innovation.

You have to have whole thriving populations of individuals with bits of the eventual answer, including bits that aren't in themselves self-sufficient, in order for crossover and inter-pollination to give you new heights of innovation. Part of that is challenging (disrupting) existing 'best answers', something that's already in the DNA of silicon valley. Right now the best answer is just to get wealthy by any means necessary, preferably by collecting rents and bringing nothing to the table (to work or develop new things would be redirecting energy that can be used to just collect rent and extort money out of the system: it's disadvantageous to make anything new or better when you can engineer the existing system to your benefit)

There is no way Gini inequality helps innovation at all. Innovation has to do with populations of actors that are all reasonably capable of addressing a problem, not seeking a single optimal individual who will do all your innovating for you. Our incentives are literally backwards.

> There has to be an optimum level

I don't think there is any level where more equality does not lead to more innovation (any evidence to the contrary is welcome).

The thing with innovation and inequality is that some government programs that help (or claim to) the first can harm the second at the same time. But AFAIK, there is no absolute antagonism between them.

It absolutely is.

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/10-countries-with-most-in...

> A poor person simply doesn't have these luxuries, and the anxiety of poverty is a killer in its own right.

When I was younger the lyrics of "Common People" by Pulp [0] really resonated with me on this point - that day to day background worry of making ends meet plagues communities.

Obviously once you reach a certain level of comfort, you get diminishing returns (and even negative returns once the money owns you), but we still need to work on getting more people up to comfort.

[0] https://genius.com/Pulp-common-people-lyrics

Not related but William Shatner (yes, Kirk) does an amazing cover of that song. (Ben Folds produces)

I think it works because Shatner's spoken work technique really brings out the lyrics.

It's scary to think what that background stress is doing as the years roll on.

I imagine having that whole weight lifted... and then I read articles like this. Maybe we're all doomed. Call the Buddhists.

Returning to ho capitalism functioned during the years of 1930-1980, before the reduction in top marginal tax rates would go a long way towards leveling the playing field.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder what, fundamentally, caused the marginal tax rate to fall? Is it the perception (or reality) that governments waste the tax money? Or is it simply the corrupting influence of wealth in govt?

I don't see how any of these would not have been true earlier though.

> Looking at research and listening to experts in this fields, it is really fascinating how anything can be made into a value system for social status

Do you have any resources that you recommend?

I agree. We have been conditioned to use wealth - which is neatly expressed as a 1-dimensional value - as a proxy for merit.

If we are asked to do something that in abstract we would consider stupid or pointless, but is now accompanied by a large amount of money, we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important.

Money provides a very simple, neat way of valuing every item or service on Earth. Deceptively simple.

> we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important

That seems to be overthinking motivation.

If a sponsor was offering $500k for someone to stand on a streetcorner and sing Weird Al songs most people wouldn't consider that was an important job but they'd still do it for the money. Because the money provides opportunity to buy or do things that are worthwhile.

Money is a simple way of valuing objective time vs opportunity.

The example I thinking of is the common counterargument to "this job/industry/company is total BS": it can't be BS, because if it was no one rational would pay someone to do it. This presupposes that everything operates in a perfectly efficient market where pay corresponds directly to utility to someone, somewhere.

The 2008 financial crash, for instance, arguably demonstrated that a lot of practices in the finance industry weren't really creating value for anyone, just deceptively pushing up the value of something worthless in order to profit from it. But if you had approached someone making $500k at Bear Sterns in 2007 and said that, it would have touched off a whole string of rationalizations that basically amount to: "I'm being paid a lot of money, so this must be useful, otherwise I wouldn't be so rich" and potentially even "if you are so smart, why aren't you making $500k?"

And it's not just finance. I've had a version of that conversation often with Googlers when I criticize the company's bizarre and inexplicably messaging strategy were they seem to deliberately blow up any semblance of a good product. Their argument is ultimately, "we get paid $200k+ to do this and you work in a power plant, how could you possibly know any better than us?"

That's what I'm trying to get at with "money as merit".

Bear Stearns employee comp is solely about the value the employees provide to the firm. The ones making that kind of money would easily be bringing in a multiple of that in sales, etc.

Just because the company got wiped out by a black swan style event means nothing about whether their employees were providing a lot of value to the firm.

No, it clearly demonstrates that these employees where not creating that much value at the firm.

Progressive betting strategies for example can appear to work in the short term, but anyone executing them is destroying value.

Janitors were providing value whether or not Bear's long exposure to MBSs were too large.

The same applies to traders, etc.

My dentist fixing my toothache still provided value to me even if I die of a massive heart attack in two months.

If you sum up all work by everyone at Bear over the companies last year, they created negative value. Some lost far more money than others, but Traders as a group where not a net money maker.

Really, the company did not die in "100 hours." People just noticed it was already dead.

Not that this makes their messaging strategy any more coherent, but 200k is on the very low end of Google compensation; new grads have offers with total compensation north of that.

But they're just new grads, so obviously they can't know much, right?

I've noticed this on multiple occasions but why do people often create new accounts just to spread propaganda regarding compensation at Google? Is this a recruiting strategy executed by paid schills?

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. If you'd review and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it.

Compensation is an intense topic for obvious reasons. There is a lot of variance in the data and it is anything but transparent. It's not surprising that people would create accounts to post sensitive information about it. I haven't seen examples of abuse in this area, but if you or anyone think you're seeing some, please email [email protected] so we can investigate.

Posting the truth about Google compensation gets you automatic downvotes for some reason here. Google / Facebook / Netflix etc compensation helps the industry significantly by making sure that even software engineers in Pittsburgh make multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

But also, compensation is a sensitive topic. I don't know of the other posts you're speaking of, but people don't like having compensation history go with their comments.

Google doesn't want you to know that you can program websites in the middle of nowhere with very relaxed hours and have a content life that doesn't require you selling your soul to FAANG.

I haven't looked deep into it because I just don't care at this point, but 200k in Mountain View isn't the same 200k in other places.

Lots of people post exaggerations here about tech salaries that “other people they know” get. Last time I pointed this out (and shared links to salary.com and Glassdoor) I was personally attacked for it. There seems to be some strong undercurrent of motivation somewhere for maintaining this meme that entry-level engineers are making $400k and all have second homes in Monaco.

> We have been conditioned to use wealth ... as a proxy for merit.

I imagine this is especially true for people who have a high score on this metric. It appeals to ego and vanity.

> we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important

oh boy I'd take a higher paying job to pay my mortgage or ease vacation with kids. No need to have a higher value than that.

> neat way of valuing every item or service on Earth

Isn't that the very concept of money? :)

Edit: newlines

Yes, the problem is that people associate what you have with what you are. Which are not the same thing. And therefor, make money the root of all evil today.

If we traded in goats, it'd be how many goats you have. It doesn't matter at all the medium, as long as the value is tenable.

To be pedantic it's pricing not valuing. Price and value (and cost) are related but different concepts.

I fell in to the karma trap on reddit years ago and I ended up trying to conform to trends to maximize my karma. Its a really boring way to use a website and I found myself not saying a lot of things because I know they will be downvoted and I will lose my internet points. These days I don't give a shit about karma and I say whatever I want. I feel better about sharing opinions and I say what I really think.

I went through the exact same arc with Reddit. Once you reach a point where you have say 100,000+ karma, no downvote can ever really touch you anymore and you can start being honest again. If in addition to that you don't care about being banned from certain subs, well, congratulations, you're once a again a free man!

My original account has been banned from hundreds of subs. The vast majority of them I had never even been on before and was bot banned because I commented on a competing sub or something. These days I just make up a random account every month.

some subs like offmychest ban anyone with a submission history to political subs like kotakuinaction as they perceive that someone with links to that subreddit cannot possibly contribute in a constructive manner. whether they are right or not is something only they as mods can perceive.

it is actually against reddit rules to auto ban users like that but it is part of the increasing number of rarely enforced rules on reddit

HN will shadowban your account if you dont conform to popular opinion enough

Aside from saying unpopular things, a net negative karma will also do it, which is a reflection of the same outcome

Always check your post history from an incognito browser to see if others can see it

90% of the stuff I post is upvoted but I don't care if one opinion I stand behind is downvoted. I also create a new account every month so that probably wont affect me.

That's against the rules, so please don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Plenty of explanations about why: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I'm afraid I do not see this part of the rule explained enough. Why is the identity important there? Wouldn't the content of the messages suffice? Often I do not even look at the name of the poster.

They're saying identity is important because only relating to an identity creates a community. But that's wrong of course, as many anonymous communities prove. I don't recognize 99% of the posters here either; it is indeed the content that makes the community.

I believe the real explanation of why identity is important to them is a bit of social psychology. The theory is that identifying with people makes them less mean to each other. So they probably want consistent identities so people will be more civil, which is one of their stated goals.

In the search link I posted above, there are lots of explanations of this, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996295. The point is that HN is a community and a community consists of people relating to one another. The fact that you can pick whatever name you want and it needn't be your real one doesn't change that.

It's also the way HN has always worked. A collection of nameless posts would be a very different kind of forum. Anyone is welcome to start one, but not to turn this one into that one.

So people can judge you by your previous posts.

the alternative to an automated one click action is a lengthy approval process...no one is going to follow this. it is trivial to create a new account. considering the userbase of this site it is even weirder to have shadowbans considering it is trivial to check and then change usernames/IPs.

also the semi-noob phrase is showing the age of that document

Isn't that against the rules, if not then I should do it, I just realised I was shadow banned 4 days ago and posted like an idiot

You can also email us to get unbanned if you want to use the site as intended. We're happy to unban people who give us reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is one to email to get unbanned if one is not aware of the ban? That’s the whole POINT of the shadow ban that HN implemented. One little mistake (or two word post in OP’s case), and you’re shouting at the wall.

So with due respect, Kafkaesque suggestions to contact the mods don’t help. What would help is getting rid of juvenile practices that are arguably ineffective, i. e., shadow bans.

We usually tell people that we've banned them. There are exceptions, mostly for spammers and serial trolls.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=we%27ve%20banned&sort=byDate&d...

> HN will shadowban your account if you dont conform to popular opinion enough

Bollocks.

Sometimes unaccepted observations can come across as wildly outlandish or insensitive depending on the topic, and initialize the fallible moderators as well

While other things conform to the prevalent opinion and masquarade as insightful high quality comments

there is a reason we can still see the now-laughable criticisms of dropbox

> the now-laughable criticisms of dropbox

But was it really?

It certainly wasn't a high-quality comment, it was too negative and arguably mean.

But the "failure" of the comment was merely a failure in correctly evaluating the business value. Something most of us have done many times in our "forum careers". Just think about all those comments that amount to not much more than "if you don't use the command line, you're not worthy of using a computer".

On a technical level it was fine. And remember, Dropbox in this very first stage was a very different beast from today's Dropbox.

I believe it's possible to achieve the same level of life satisfaction by translating your experience of the world through a lens of gratitude and purpose. I've had opportunities to meet and get to know people with high net worth (mostly successful entrepreneurs) and people that willingly chose to live below the poverty line (religious devotees, teachers in poor communities, public advocates in poorly-funded non-profits, etc). I can't say one is happier than the other. Both require you to sacrifice things you might otherwise want. For the rich, that sacrifice usually takes the form of unstable family life (if any family at all) and alienated relationships with children because they work too much. For the poor, that takes the form of more immediate, material sacrifices like worrying about food, healthcare, and housing. But something both share in common is that they can be happy if they are grateful for what they have. Gratitude is a powerful thing.

Curiously enough, the least happy people I've met are the ones that fall into neither category. Enough money to feel safe, fed, and warm, but no direction or meaning in their life. They aren't sure what to do with themselves. Should they try for more money? Should they choose a less vapid career path? They can't give up the middle-class salary or the middle-class experience. It's very sad.

Did not even realise there was a leaderboard for HN karma. I stopped tracking my own karma score a while back. I was getting upset by even a handful of downvotes, and as soon as I decided to just publish my thoughts without caring about down (or up) votes, my happiness went up quite a few notches.

For the curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

It actually used to be one of the top tabs but was removed when PG realized that people trying to score points off each other hurt the quality of discussion. IIRC it was the same time that point totals for each comment were hidden from everyone but the author.

Maybe it would be a good idea to hide your own total karma too. It's always right there on the top right, and I can't help looking at it. And I feel happy and proud when that number has gone up, and upset when it has gone down.

Much more useful would be notifications of people responding to my comments, or maybe even people continuing discussions that I'm interested in. It's easy to lose track of those if I haven't posted in them.

tampermonkey script to do just that (would be nicer if HN could pop the karma into a span with an id :-) )

// ==UserScript==

// @name hide HN karma

// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/

// @version 0.1

// @description hide HN karma

// @author You

// @match https://news.ycombinator.com/*

// @grant none

// ==/UserScript==

(function() {

    'use strict';  

    if(document.getElementById('me') !== null){   

      //hide karma 

        Array.from(document.getElementById('me').parentElement.childNodes)  

            .filter(x => x.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE)  

            .forEach(y => {y.textContent=' '})  


        //remove link to profile page

        let me = document.getElementById('me');  

        let newme = document.createElement('span');  

        newme.textContent = me.textContent;  

        me.parentElement.replaceChild(newme,me)  

        ;  

    }  

})();

Thanks, I was looking into that earlier today but postponed it exactly because there was no element with an id, so I'd had to look up stuff to write it.

Actually, hide karma part can be done clearer with just:

        //hide karma  

        let karma = document.getElementById("me").nextSibling;  

        karma.textContent = " | "

Credit to user jackowayed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460631

> Did not even realise there was a leaderboard for HN karma.

It's a well kept secret.

And I've been much happier since I stopped looking at it, but every now and then I fall off the wagon and sneak a peek.

Well, I implore you to do us all a favour and NOT publish the link to the leaderboard... :)

Wouldn't dream of it.

I spent years and years playing a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) trying to top the leaderboard. Once there, I couldn't stop. I kept going and going, until one day I overflowed the signed 32 bit int experience, and then promptly disappeared from the rankings.

That turned out to be a good thing. I lost most interest in advancing the counter...

When a bug can save a life :D

I'm not trying to be #1 but I do feel iike scores on various sites have a negative influence on me.

Added this to my `userContent.css` in firefox to hide my scores and votes

    @-moz-document domain(news.ycombinator.com) {
        .score { display: none; }
        body>center>table>tbody>tr:first-child>td>table>tbody>tr:first-child>td:nth-child(3) {
            visibility: hidden;
        }
        body>center>table>tbody>tr:first-child>td>table>tbody>tr:first-child>td:nth-child(3) a {
            visibility: visible;
        }
        html[op=user]>body>center>table>tbody>tr:nth-child(0n+3)>td:first-child form>table>tbody>tr:nth-child(3) {
            display: none;
        }
    }

which HN would just let me check a box "no score"

Interesting. I've noticed that the upvoting/downvoting system isn't very objective and tends to favor one side of an opinion over another. Meaning people will upvote you on HN if what you post resonates with them, and HN readership is skewed towards one end of the political/social spectrum. This means that the reward mechanism of HN (upvoting for karma), rewards those with content that conforms rather than challenges some of the assumptions and opinions that run prevalent here. It's very analogous to the real world and money. It's quite rare to be rewarded monetarily for challenging status quo or established trends/opinions. If I was to open a business to challenge an incumbent in an industry, the obstacles I'd face make the risk daunting. That's why the failure rate for start-ups is so high. I'd love to see a study of HN and Reddit and their voting system to see if we can find any strong correlations between that and the real world.

Social animals value status. But better to earn it achieving meaningful goals you'll be proud of years from now. HN will be forgotten soon enough.

> There is something visceral about looking at a number that you have somehow convinced yourself is a measure of your value as a human being

If only we could somehow get the rich to look at the CO2 ppm and be excited about that number getting smaller.

My accounting professor use to always say, "You get what you measure."

It didn't seem as so insightful then, but as I navigate this world, I get it.

Yes there's a similar quote I read somewhere which is now a part of my internal monologue: "You can't improve what you can't measure." So, I'm always trying to measure everything about my life and improving and optimizing things.

Something similar happens with school grades . You get labeled as an A kid, a B kid, you define yourself like that, and a good part of your life is spent fulfilling the spectations of that grade.

Money can’t purchase genuine human connection, and that’s pretty much the root of it.

Anything that can be purchased is that much more enjoyable when real human connection is involved, otherwise it honestly doesn’t matter how lavish the thing is, it just becomes kind of boring.

It’s possible to purchase fake connection, but again it’s pretty boring because it’s fake.

Even the money making process is more boring without genuine connections to others.

Assuming link karma counts, then it seems like you could spend a couple of hours writing a Selenium script that would check the XX most upvoted HN websites for new content every minute, and then copy the title field and URL for HN submission. I suspect running that for a few hours every day would see you climb to the top very fast, and it would require very little maintenance.

I've installed browser extensions to turn off karma/points on as many sites as I can find. For me this has worked well.

I still kid my wife about "internet points" when I take a photo for Google Maps and the like, and I totally empathise with you on the feeling of seeing that number, but for my own peace of mind I've had to restrict myself from it.

Not to be too cynical, but the people who start schmoozing after you become rich probably just want a bit of the gold...

I've downvoted you, but only because it's what you would have wanted

"Why Aren’t Hacker News Leaders Happy With the Karma They Have?"