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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Ok, assume without loss of generality that we choose karma as the reward mechanism. How do we measure how much karma to give to whom? If it's just for activity on /newest, people will write bots to game it, and we'll end up worse off than before. There needs to be a way to reward doing a good job of selecting stories, but not a bad job. How do you measure a good job?

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> How do you measure a good job?

If a story that I upvoted from /newest ends up getting lots of love(=upvotes) on HN then I have done a good job.

For this to work in practice there needs to be /staging. Here's the workflow,

- Karma hungry scavengers (like me) would go to /newest and upvote some interesting stories.

- Some of these stories move to /staging where non-scavengers (yet karma hungry) reads & upvotes the interesting ones.

- After a certain threshold on /staging the story moves to HN homepage.

- If my story makes it to homepage, I should get a % of final story points (say 10%) as a karma bounty. I help community discover great content from a river and I'm directly rewarded in proportion to the quality of content (maybe only after the story crosses a certain threshold).

- People who upvote from /staging should also get a % karma bump (although lower than me).

I know we are basically creating mini-HN with /staging but I'm suggesting this approach based on your past comments about folks's emotional connection to homepage (many people only want to see quality content on homepage).

A simple approach would be to add a short "New" section at the bottom of the frontpage, which shows about 5 semi-randomly chosen submissions from the last few hours that haven't seen much engagement yet.

That would encourage more curation without much effort, but also without too much distraction for users only interested in the top.

Add a toggle to hide the section persistently and everyone should be happy.

We tried that once - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411356.

You might set a karma ceiling for the reward system, so that it only applies to a particular band of the karma spectrum; the bot is pointless after the threshold has been reached, so there's less incentive to write it.

(I wonder sometimes what things on the site should exclude people based on high karma).

Here’s one idea. Don’t reward anything. Just find a way to remind people that newest exist and send them there more often. Perhaps by putting a link such as “HN new: Please curate new submissions” randomly in place of one normal story on the HN, some percentage of times.

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