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A comment on Auto submission bots on Hacker News. Parent comment

Re:Auto submission bots on Hacker News by biot on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @07:08AM (#2386647)
Someone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale.

The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?

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Re:Auto submission bots on Hacker News by regularfry on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @09:38AM (#2387098)
The maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma.

Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.

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