The upvotes that people give this "joke" (it’s not really meant to be funny at all), regardless of how often they’ve heard it before, probably means that they agree with the sentiment, and as members of the same community have the option to make that vote as they see fit. Hopefully they don’t upmod because they find the post humorous. It’s meant to be commentary on the state of the community, and your negative responses only seem to validate the point further.

Interesting how the net’s anonymity results in much sharper criticism than you find the real world. For example, you would never call a joke stupid if someone you had just met told it, regardless of how many times you’d heard it before. Something to consider, especially given that we’re all here to focus on the same goal: learning from one another, gaining valuable insight, growing as a community. Not disrespecting one another.

I may not have been a registered user for very long, but I have read HN for quite a long time before that, and am just as immersed and interested in the startup community as any one of you. I agree that, if anyone cares about karma, a formula that gives karma based upon length of time they’ve been a registered member of the community is a cool idea.. I’m all for informative, excellent content, but I’m also not against a bit of humor, commentary, or just plain fun. What good is being entrepreneurial if you can’t have fun?

Now stop upvoting this post!

So think about it. If there are 20 HN readers out there with your rss submitter, then everything from 37signals would instantly have 19 points. This would most definitely instantly catapult the story to #1 on the front page, garnering it a lot of exposure and opportunity for more upvotes.

So really it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twenty people all trying to submit the same story the instant it comes out results in a karma lottery for whoever randomly submits it first. The other 19 people will see the instant karma and try even harder.

1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you

2. Make an interesting comment for that submission

3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment

4. GOTO 1

   while (true) 
      1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you
      2. Make an interesting comment for that submission
      3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment

The benefits are twofold: The community gets extremely quick exposure to content it seems to really appreciate, and no user gets huge karma just for being the first to submit PG's new essay.

Save the karma for people finding things you couldn't find yourself.

edit: Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here. I just wanted to post that I agree, despite not being new here and not being particularly hurting for karma.

Newness has nothing to do with it. We welcome and embrace newbies all the time.

They're probably dogging on his post because he has struck a sensitive nerve.

Let's turn this lemon into a shandy and figure out what to do about it.

IOW, we are saying: "We hate most spolsky/coding horror/raganwald/..." posts, but from time to time there's a good one in there, so please ferret out the good stuff for us. Posting stuff from Paul Graham or Tech Crunch is not going to be rewarded.

Sounds suspiciously like re are rewarding risk-takers. That seems to be in the spirit of hacker news.

Oh wait... that's all covered. Karma is stupid, and nobody really cares except for when these dumb posts come up a couple times a month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radler

lol - beer-flavored lemonade? Silly Europeans ;)

This could also include a karma bank so that once it's determined you're not a bot or a moron, you'd get the karma you deserve.

(Q = R = 30, S = 0.1)

How very... feudal.

Anyway, the reward of getting from karma 1 to karma R is greater than from R to R + hogging. If a user is past R karma and then decides to hog, then they're a moron and we should do something about that too.

Any ideas?

"We don't teach people to be nice, we hire nice people" --Leona Helmsley (sp?)

I think we can punish egregiously bad behaviour and we can moderate things, that eliminates outliers. But fundamentally our approach should be to encourage nice people to join and discourage trolls so that they leave.

It is not clear to me that karma is a good mechanism for that... if there is a game, some people will play for the sheer pleasure of winning.

I think the number one way to encourage nice people to use a social site responsibly is to swiftly and severly punish trolling. Nothing sends a message that you prefer signal over noise like banning noisemakers.

JM2C, doesn't really do much about bots.

I think this represents a violation of the spirit of HN.

What's the point of karma? It's not money, it's not friendship, and it's not interesting; so who cares?

A downvote should be a warning that you've wasted this community's time.

An upvote tells you your contribution was appreciated by at least some members and that you've contributed something useful.

Wanton upvotes (aka "karma whoring") simply tell you that you've figured out how to game the system.

I mean if everybody only used the (up|down)vote arrows as a measure of how much something was worthy of submission, or how much a comment was contributing to discussion it would be great, but you can't rely on people to do that (and they often don't), so the meaning of karma approaches nil.

HN seems to be a bit better about this than most sites with such a system (reddit and slashdot particularly), but I suspect that's because its user base is (or was, I'm not too sure recently) pretty small.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

This is just like saying "I'm sick of hearing about all those startups in Silicon Valley - I only want to hear about startups from other places."

Sarcasm duly noted.

  user    : bporterfield
  created : 30 days ago
  karma   : 38

  8 comments, 1.50 points per comment [searchyc.com]

(In all seriousness, the karma number quantifies the approbation of your peers; and a good reputation is highly valued by most people--and rationally so, I'd say).

Karma isn't really important, what's more important is improving the community and quality of submissions. It's better to have people manually submit every post from a particular feed, since eventually you'll hit a few posts that aren't really relevant, and those will be left out, helping the signal-vs-noise ratio (pun intended).

I think it is instructive to consider if most of the negative commentary regarding the 37 Signals submissions would disappear if the source was different (eg, they came from author X instead).

Agree downmod would be helpful. Even if it had a very high karma or HN usage period requirement in order to use I think it would help the community.

Initial candidates for such no-credit status: TC, PG, 37, CH, XKCD... though the list could be dynamic based on number or popularity of recent submissions.

(Crop rotation for mindharvests?)

If you want reasons, here they are: 1. Your original comment was of no value. 2. In general, replying to your own comment to indicate that your original comment was downmodded gives me more reason to downmod you.

Not everyone's as smart as you, maybe the poster needs it said to him/her.

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon you're gonna be dead

-John Lennon

thats pretty lame. i guess no jokes allowed on YC, even (imo) good natured ones.

http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield