Ask PG: No (visible)Karma HN?

2 pointsmanish2 comments

I was wondering what would be HN, when no karma is visible. I know it was tried once for comments, but how about stories and users. If you look at profile, you cannot see one's karma. Though stories come to front page based on upvotes, the number of upvotes should not be visible. Is it the karma that motivates the people to make comments and submit stories, or there is more to it? Can we try it as a experiment?

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I like things pretty much the way they are. If a story has a high point value, I'll take a look, even if the title might not grab me. I also dont mind someone contributing a good story to get karma. I havent noticed a lot of story spamming, so I think the present system works pretty well.

That said, improvement will always be necessary to keep the site fresh.

I thought about it because of lot of Apple/ipad/iphone/andriod stories, which were far from gratifying one's intellectual curiosity, also there are lot of comments about front page of HN being far from what it was about 2 years ago.

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