Ask HN: Has your HN karma score helped you in any way?
I know the main purpose of being on HN is not obtaining karma, but I was wondering whether users with relatively high karma have found it useful/helpful in any way.
I lurked for many, many months before I started contributing, and I encourage all of you out there to share what you like and what you know.
I’d also be lying if I said secretly knowing my karma score was high when the topic of HN came up didn’t cause me to smile mentally. Even if if the topic revolved around how “HN is toxic, brogrammers” etc because I felt that these people can’t see beyond their own biases to see the real community that dang and scbt actively take no small part in taking care of.
Being a tiny part of the HN community is something I am thankful and grateful for. I wrote about it earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18509717
Every time someone downvotes me it literally makes me feel like shit for like a day.
This includes reddit as well.
I’m not saying I’m looking for upvotes and I’m not on Facebook so it’s not about being “liked”.
When I’m downvoted I’m so afraid I have offended someone or I said something extremely fallacious.
It has gotten to the point where I have contemplated not ever participating again which is a shame because I’m nervous (assuming I’m not an extreme fringe case) there is some sort of convergent sheep opinion when there should be diversity in thought.
So if someone came to me and said hire me and look I have xyz karma on xyz platform I might even be less inclined to hire given how much I feel it has poisoned my own thought.
I think there should be rewards for getting highly downvoted comments that aren't mean (but are constructive but express an unpopular opinion).
> I think there should be rewards for getting highly downvoted comments that aren't mean (but are constructive but express an unpopular opinion).
It's just as easy to express a viewpoint that sounds smart but is absolutely ridiculous. Some unpopular opinions are actually nonsensical, others have merit but people just don't want to accept the ideas. That's the issue with the karma system: people decide the merit, and people can't differentiate between the two unless they're incredibly open minded - most people aren't.
You know that when you get downvoted 200-300 points and you laugh, you have discarded for good the very idea of karma points having value. I did.
When I left left Reddit at the start of this year, I had something like 50,000 karma. To say it like that means I only remember the value to somewhere within 10,000. So that means my actual karma was somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000. 20,000 karma is quite a big range if karma has any value at all, and yet it is just a meaningless and irrelevant number.
Now repeat after me: "Karma is just a random number that has no meaning at all in real life."
Karma systems work great if everyone used them as intended, for quality of content or thought, but they're more often used for how much you agree with the sentiment of a comment and if it agrees with the philosophy of the person voting, regardless of the merit of the comment.
For that reason, I'm sure there must be a better way to do karma for a site that is made to be productive, and not just an echo chamber.
Create a new account and make its goal to gather as much negative karma on HN as possible. This process may help you outgrow the fear and to grow as a person.
What's the worst that can happen? Your handle gets banned from the site? Nobody will miss a sleep over that.
There have to be ways to boost your self esteem without pissing off the rest of the world.
If I'm wrong, I feel bad that I was wrong but I'm happy other people have let the general public know I was wrong by downvoting my comment. More often though, I'm right and people just don't want to hear it.
The fastest way to get downvoted is by saying "I like typing on Apple's new keyboard, the Esc key on the Touchbar works just fine for me, and their Pro lineup fits my needs perfectly as a professional". Every statement in there might be true but there is a group of HN users who cannot stand the thought that any of those statements might be true and will absolutely destroy your karma for it.
Without any penalty for downvoting unpopular opinions, it's just something we have to deal with. And if it starts to get too much, I jump ship to Lobste.rs for a bit where the community is less toxic overall and downvoting is substantially harder.
Other than that, the karma is essentially "interesting" but ultimately irrelevant. HN upvotes seem to be only used by people who align and agree with you. Not whether you've added something substantial to the discussion.
On the flip side, I've found that HN downvotes are used by people disagreeing with you without them needing to explain exactly why. I've even had people say I've broken the rules but upon examination I can't actually see the transgression. (So it was useless feedback on their part).
In some cases I've been accused of various things and had people demand to know where I work or to not use a throwaway account ("man up and use your real account" or similarly useless statements). They clearly intended to dox me and were thwarted in their attempt. Then they got angry.
The good thing about a downvote is a single DV in a busy thread makes the comment a lot less visible. So if it's spammy or offensive it quickly sorts it out. I'll do a downvote + flag.