HN Karma obviously!

What's the point of HN Karma honestly ?

Are you really asking what's the point of having... points?

They are points!

I trade mine in for its current dollar value by messaging pg and he wires over the cash.

Some HN features are gated on karma.

Endorphins when you see it going up.

So practically useless right ? But i have an idea of chrome extension to hide karma. I hate to see my karma point. I just don't care.

Just use uBlock Origin to block that particular DOM element.

Surely, if you hate to see it, then you do care, right?

Everybody likes to see their numbers go up.

Except on the scale

make the groupthink easier to track via API

replacement for real life achievement

Downvoting. But it's easy to karma whore up to 500.

I'm not even sure how I got to 2. I rarely bother to comment, yet here we are.

Once you have more than 500, you unlock downvotes! Worth it for that alone.

Does HN have any guidance on when and why to downvote ? Or just personally ?

You are stealing: downvote. You are playing music too loud: downvote, right away. Driving too fast: downvote. Slow: downvote. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you get downvoted. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, Downvote. You overcook chicken, also downvote. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, downvote, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of downvoting.

If he steals things from a thief, will you downvote ?

If the urgency bus drive too fast, will you downvote ?

If he playing music too loud under the rain, will you downvote ?

...

Whoosh: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eiyfwZVAzGw :)

It’s a humorous commentary on how fickle HN karma can be

Paul Graham has posted his thoughts about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.

Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.

> Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.

Even that got abused, as comments people didn't like would be modded off-topic or troll.

It may just be a natural internet behavior to suppress that which you disagree with.

If you remove the word ‘internet’ you’re right in track.

I'd like to see a site that punishes people for downvoting for the wrong reason.

Honestly we don't need downvoting at all. Just upvoting to allow good stuff to rise, and flagging for hate speech and illegal stuff.

Can't disagree with this enough. Twitter exists, and it sucks. Every site that only allows upvoting becomes a segregated cesspool as different factions just cheerlead in their own tribal zones.

Twitter sucks for other reasons, not because they disallow downvoting.

Please, pray tell, how would you even determine if something was "for the wrong reason".

Slashdot had metamoderation, where you were asked whether various anonymized votes/tags were valid or not.

The same applied for "upvote"

I wonder how it would work if we had different kinds of upvote/downvote.

Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick second if it is a disagreement about something they feel strongly about

Personally, I would find that helpful.

When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong, etc.

But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm always curious about what the issue was. I think potentially valuable information and personal learning is lost.

In my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.

In the guidelines, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html see the section "In Comments". Comments violating those guidelines are reasonable candidates for downvoting.

In theory : Does the comment contribute to the conversation?

In practice : Pure jellyfish-brain embrace/reject reaction. A gaggle of flatworms with keyboards

I would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for having a random username assigned to every one of my posts with my history being obscured while still keeping track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.

That deep feeling of fulfillment.

Not sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or just the voting system in general. In either case, just for a start, I think discussions are easier to have & follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment to engage in the discussion vs posting something like "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering), whether your total karma is displayed or not.

The same point everywhere - to drive discussion to popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to encourage conformity to board culture through operant conditioning and gamification. If you give people a number and tell them that number is special, they'll do whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid whatever makes it go down.

At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)

To give you dreams like the done I had last night where I lost 6 points and decided to delete my comment so I wouldn’t lose any more.

See the key is to get into thousands and not care about 0.1% changes either way. Bollock enough and someone will upvote it.

It empowers us to disappear distasteful opinions.

That sweet ability to downvote.

Impressing the ladies!

Good news: Your karma stays around even after you delete all your posts/comments!

Bad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think you need to update and replace your old posts with something blank like a space before you delete them. My knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out that I’m wrong.

It replaces the comment with a predefined string: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit/shredde...

If it replaces comment with a predefined string - doesn’t it trigger a notification to the person you’re replying to?

I don't think so, I surely would have got a notification from someone doing that to their message at this point but I don't think I have.

I laughed.

475? Not 47.5k? I think you can easily have 7.5k per 3 months or so on Reddit. HN is way harder.

The average upvote count for comments here is 5, anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't obsessed.

I disagree, it's extremely easy on both. Like, sure, it is slower on HN but community is also smaller

Yeah, my most recent throwaway Reddit account has 62.5k in only 9 months.

It is impossible to interact in some subreddits if you dont have xyz karma or have a # weeks old account

You don't interact. Let them die slowly.

Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.

What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit? Redditors are the minorities.

Curious why you are contributing here?

Arguably, Hacker News is a lot of an echo chamber too.

What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News? Hacker News users are even more of a minority than Redditors.

Their account is from 2007 and has <2k karma. I'd say they stand by what they wrote on this platform too.

> What’s the point to get your “2c” heard on Hacker News?

Archiving helps me know more about myself. Primarily, I use forums as a way to archive my viewpoints and how I have reasoned them. It's spectacularly rewarding when discussions devolve into an argument and I know specifically how and why I came to a certain conclusion, because I can reference thoughts that I reasoned before. Rarely, I find my views challenged in a constructive way that informs and changes the mind of one party or the other...if only on tangential topics. That's always nice.

It's also handy to listen to the echo chamber to get ahold of the zeitgeist of that particular group, which is useful when interacting with other people in real life that espouse particular aligned views. Now you can have an interesting conversation, you might not have had otherwise, which is a practical sociological benefit.

Yes, but the original question asker asked the person who said using Reddit was pointless. All your reasons also apply to Reddit.

I'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.

I mean, I hear you if you're posting your opinion as comment 18,753 on an r/news post about the former president. But I've had some genuinely helpful interactions on smaller subreddits - things like getting guidance on how to repair old Nintendo Game and Watch hardware. It's not about getting one's opinion heard, it's about giving and getting help among folks who share the same hobby.

I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit commits suicide.

IMO reddit/HN feel similar as communities if you clearly steer away from the most popular subreddits

The difference is, HN is a separate website, with reddit the different communities start to bleed into each other

Imo: there's too much stupidity in the popular subreddits, sharing a space with that is too much to ask

Not that much, not unless they are related somehow (say /r/games and /r/pcgaming). Even then they can feel quite differently depending on moderator policy.

Reddit is a really, really, really good system for connecting people who have a niche interest. You can still do forums and so forth for those things, but discoverability isn't nearly as good. It's been co-opted by venture capital and is becoming less so, but right now it's a great community unmatched elsewhere on the internet in it's scale and quality.

Reddit is a really good system for getting incredibly-niche oriented persons to subsume a subreddit, drive a bunch of engagement, yet suck all the usable air out of the channel, and make it next to impossible for a interested-but-casual user to meaningfully participate. Just like Twitter, the people who make the service their personality get to enjoy the network effects, and everyone else might as well be spitting in the wind.

What exactly are you advocating for here? People being less interested in things?

I think you know full well that I'm not advocating pEoPLE BeIng lESS iNTErESTEd in THiNGS. My idea would be to assign karma based on a logarithmic scale so that people with "just" an interest in the topic aren't immediately shoved to the bottom of the barrel by people with nothing but time to make the site their personality.

Benson Leung who is fairly well known for his USB C reviews is now a moderator of /r/UsbCHardware/ and through him I was able to fix a bug in the USB C specification. I have no idea how I would've done it without the connection Reddit provides.

Reddit wasn't "co-opted" by venture capital. It was built by venture capital!

It literally started as a result of the founders taking money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.

Hear the story here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-huffman-co-found...

It probably depends on the niche. I've found reddit occasionally useful for this, but the community on reddit tends to be a bit monolithic, so I've not found reddit useful as a sole, or primary, source of this sort of thing.

There are legitimate use cases for reddit interactions. Some of the smaller communities in particular, discussing specific games or health conditions for example, actually are excellent. Most are not that good, however.

> Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.

Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.

Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you can talk about something niche so you don't have to go register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.

The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much like the bigger the story here the same effect will happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to identify and move on/not follow those subs.

for most sites like that... i probably don't want to be there anyway.

except HN of course

You don't interact. Let them die slowly.

It is the normal lifecycle that platforms die. Look at MySpace.

The key question here is: "So what?"

And that is not a snide, snarky question - it is a sincere inquiry. Why is interacting in subreddits with karma gates important to your life?

Some of the serious technical discussion subreddits I use for technical discussions won’t allow anyone with new accounts or a low amount of karma to participate.

If you’re trying to have a technical discussion, you’d be locked out.

Sounds like a terrible place to centre your support system on.

I do find that there is no better indicator about the quality of a sub-reddit, than that class of requirements.

The more karma/age/posts they require, the more likely the place is a cesspool of some sort.

I've found a very light set of restrictions - possibly even only on select posts - is tremendously helpful for content quality. But anything beyond a light set quickly throws the whole community off kilter and into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.

A lot of subreddits - especially smaller ones - would be instantly overrun by spambots without these requirements.

I've made a lot of alts and that never has been a problem, just post some vaguely affirmative comment in popular thread and boom, 50 karma.

The whole idea is utterly stupid because it is far too easy to get on popular low effort subreddit and get some points for posting absolute garbage, then go and bother people in niche subreddit.

While karma requirements are easy to overcome, many spammers don't go through the effort to do so.

They take about 2-3 days of significant engagement for most subreddits karma requirement. Some take weeks of existing.

If you have to wait 2-3 days to comment the moment as they say has passed and very few would read it.

Its not too bad, it is a pretty good way of excluding no karma bot accounts.

Pfff, I’m collecting HN points for a rainy day; they’re worth at least 10 Reddit points each!

Every time someone down-votes me here, they kill my future, bit by bit.

I have ~100k on reddit, but somehow hacker news managed to make my ~500 points feel far more valuable.

likewise. I have over half a million on reddit but all I did was crosspost links and make funny comments that probably wouldn't land on HN

I hate to break it to you but neither is particularly valuable.

Man, those are Hacker News numbers. About 300 times as many people have upvoted my drunken rants on Reddit.

That's like whole week of commenting!

Hopefully one day we can redeem it for cash with all that API money they're making off the posts that generated it :)

There was a time when you could get bitcoin for your reddit karma... back when spending several bitcoin for a pizza was a thing.