Request HN: Something nice for reaching 1000 karma
We get nice things at 250 and 500 karma. 1000 is a bummer. Nothing happens.
May be give us the ability to change the background color or something?
May be give us the ability to change the background color or something?
I became so troubled by my own reaction that I added a couple lines of CSS to disable the absolute counter in the corner of every page. That number is toxic.
Edit: his username is ibdknox.
Cheers!
#hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop {
font-size: 0;
}
#hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop a {
font-size: 10pt;
}
#hnmain td td:last-child .pagetop a:first-child::after {
content: ' | ';
}I’m not saying that means you should hide your karma.
HN already fixed my biggest pet-peeves: collapsable comments and the ability to undo an accidental up/down vote.
The background color when reaching 1000 karma, for instance.
Just kidding ;) My post was not meant to be taken 100% seriously. I just thought it might be nice to brainstorm about what could happen at 1000. I agree that pretty much all of the must have features are there already.
I think you can already do that via the "unvote" href that appears after voting--at least for upvotes; I almost never downvote, so I don't know if the reverse is true. I believe it is, though.
The utility of it as a means of operant conditioning and positive behavioral reinforcement can be debated (personally, I wish it would be done away with) but chasing karma is already a part of the site.
This also seems like one of those things where Goodhart's law may apply.
As a corollary to my point, we'd also like thought-provoking material rather than pure provocateurs. But I'd take an intelligent provocateur over a philosophically/historically uninformed HN comment any day of the week.
As this brief discussion of the HN metagame shows, anything that gets a number stuck next to it will attract people to optimizing it like flies to a manure pile...
Mostly I upvote if the user posted interesting/useful information.
Sometimes I upvote things I disagree with if I think it promotes a good discussion.
My concern with any change made is that it would encourage people to try and get a bunch of karma which could have unforeseen effects on the quality of discussion/submissions. I'm sure you'll be taking that into account for any change made, though.
Downvoting posts could be used to build algorithmic feeds, so users could see content corresponding to the ratio of items they voted up or down. But that might be too much of a "social media" feature and I could see Hacker News getting out the torches and pitchforks for something like that.
I think both in practice and in theory the function downvotes serve for comments are served by flags on posts.
I know, I know, that's an old one as well. But hey, it would be really really nice.
Maybe an orange shirt (thick cotton, I hate those thin cheap ones), with a white "HN" surrounded by a white box outline.
That's why it's called "karma".