Hacker News Reader

Comment by epochwolf | Hacker News Reader

No thanks. Hacker news does not need badges.

Edit as requested:

Hacker news does not need badges because hacker news is about content. (Discussion and articles) Badges will do nothing to add to this and would risk ruining the experience.

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Thanks for the additional info. What about StackOverflow then? That's also about content. (Questions and answers) Badges there seem to encourage contribution. What's special about HN, in your opinion?

> What about StackOverflow then? That's also about content. (Questions and answers) Badges there seem to encourage contribution.

StackOverflow is for programmers, and its scope pretty much limits participation to programmers and people directly tangential to programming. Thus, you don't get the internet hoi polloi problem.

> What's special about HN, in your opinion?

The editors and culture have largely managed to turn back the horde of lolcats, not funny puns, flamewars, and vacuous content. This is nigh impossible on a broad scope site. Hacker News is an incredibly rare feat, and has a fragile equilibrium that needs constant attention to preserve.

If hard-editing killing and re-titling submissions stopped, how long until this site denigrated to chaos? I'd say the over/under is two weeks.

Well, it already has a leaderboard and some other sorts of rankings, http://news.ycombinator.com/lists which I find very useful. Not sure why the link to it is buried at the bottom of the page.

The reason they're buried is because they exist to satisfy peoples' curiosity, not to serve as a leaderboard. PG doesn't want HN to turn into a karma race (and I agree).

I would be happy if HN didn't have karma at all. I don't think it adds anything to my use of the site.

There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated with people trolling. It's also useful for identifying comments which lots of people find useful - or ones which are useless. It's basically a community-powered spamfilter and measure of relevance. That said, I would be entirely in favor of hiding or obscuring karma, outside of comment sorting (and even that could be obscured while still being useful).

Of course, hiding/obscuring karma could remove some of the motivation to upvote comments. It would be interesting to see how usage patterns changed if it was hidden/obscured ...

An option to hide karma would be useful as well, for people who aren't interested (like you). I wonder if there's an extension for some browser which does that; if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write one [stripping out everything in the form of "# points" and the (#) next to the username in the bar at the top of a page ... adding display:none to all the score_# classes and applying a bit of filtering to pagetop would do that.]

I'm also in favor of getting rid of downvotes, mostly because I see them abused too much (people being downvoted for expressing unpopular opinions, especially anti-apple), but that's neither here nor there.

One thing I like a lot about it is that you don't get the "first post" effect, where the first few people to say something get page top and all the attention. That's how it is on Slashdot.

I agree that the lists page is useful, but I don't use it for finding out about posters. It's a good filter for content, as it can help me find the most upvoted posts, the ones with the most discussion, and insightful comments on stories I may not have seen.

Why not? Would be very helpful if you could elaborate, so we can all learn something.

I don't think hackers see value in fake awards. I for one don't see the point, except for the desire to compete to see who's got more badges on their sash. Until these badges can buy me a sandwich, pay my rent, etc, I'll leave them for the kiddies to collect.

Hear, hear. The real award for me from reading HN, would be if it ultimately made me smarter and more informed, and therefore successful in starting (and hopefully selling) a startup. Not to mention having a cool place to hang out digitally with like-minded people ;-)

Makes good sense. What if instead there're badges for hackers based on their coding ability? What would you think of that? (Not that it's easy to compute of course.)

There could be a badge for people who create successful startups. It might look something like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/New100fro...

You would collect a lot of them from your customers or via an acquisition.

Doesn't TopCoder somewhat address that?

http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=top_developers

I would rather judge and be judged on the merit of a comment, not by who is making it.

Hack News is a place I frequent to come across interesting subject matter. It is not a place to accrue accolades based on posted material. There are plenty of other communities to visit if you want to make a name for yourself.

I agree. While I note upvotes while I'm looking at the discussion threads, I rarely look at the leaderboards or a user's profile for upvote counts.

And if it wasn't for my own count next to my username, I likely wouldn't know how many upvotes I had.

Rather than putting extra layers of complexity on to the site, I feel that if a plugin/add-on to the browser was offered that would provide this functionality gained enough momentum then the discussion of implementing it on to the site would be worth further discussion.

I think the biggest draw for a lot of us is the pure simplicity in the site as it is.

It really depends on what kind of badges/achievements are created.

We definitely wouldn't want anything like "submitted 10 posts to HN", but something like "submitted the most popular comment in an article" might be cool.

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