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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

yes but a karma threshhold can be reached in a few weeks if not days. So it's not long enough for someone to get used to the idea that this isn't reddit

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I think the solution to this is to have no Karma on submitted stories.

If karma comes only from useful comments then I'd posit that the user will be more invested in discusion and not as likely to down vote others.

not really, since that will put a lot of emphasis on comments, so downvoting someone would hurt them even more

I don't see your argument.

My point is if you remove karma for submitted stories you only get people who earned the right to downvote via well thought out comments.

My hypothesis is that these are the type of people who are more likely to counter a point they disagree with, with a well thought out comment, rather than a downvote, as that's how they got the karma they have to begin with.

Doesn't every comment start with 1 point, though? People trying to game the system could still do so simply by commenting a lot (maybe on older, less visible submissions that won't get them down-votes). Maybe every comment should start at 0 points?

I believe you don't actually earn a point until someone upvotes you away from that default 1.

I agree. One thing that bothers me about the karma on stories system is that an extremely popular story gets you an absurd amount of karma. But the thing about extremely popular stories is that they would have been posted by someone else if you didn't post them. So it's really a huge reward for simply being quicker then other users. On the other hand, and obscure story that get's on the board for a few hours, and that no one else would have posted gets much less points.

Perhaps stories that make the front page for X amount of time should earn a standard rate of karma for the submitter. Or even just a limit, say you can't get more then 10 karma on a submission.

I've been member for almost 2 years and still haven't reached the karma threshold. it's simply more difficult to build up karma on specialized site such as hackernews

reddit is general purpose, you can collect points merely by posting pictures of kitties or nsfw.

not really, just submit like 5 techcrunch posts, and you are pretty much guaranteed 200 points, just from the people who also submit techcrunch stuff hoping to be the first. And since these end up in upvotes, you are pretty much guaranteed frontpage.

Try gaining karma from well thought out comments rather than posting stories. I think you'll find that's how most of the respected names on this site do it.

Karma rewards extrinsic behaviour, there's no reward for just logging in and reading stories on HN.

I think that explains why some are members for 2 years, comfortable in reading the content on the site and contributing rather rarely when they have something insightful to say, while others are able to reach the threshold for down-voting in short periods of time without fully understanding the community or reading the guidelines.

If you get lucky with a couple story posts, yes. If you're strictly commenting you've got a while.

Yea maybe that is it, 200 karma from comments for downvote privilege.

That's how it is right now.

I like how there's plenty of examples of down voting and not discussing the reason on this thread.

I'm assuming you got down voted because it's just a flat karma value (I guess 200?) to allow down votes. They meant that your karma from submissions shouldn't count because it's trivially obtained.

Edit: Thanks for down voting this.

I reached it with my first post, i think. maybe it should be a function of community karma distribution, eg only the top 80% can downvote.

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