Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I think I am going to start a degree-granting "University." I will give credit for life accomplishments, but my standards will be especially narrow and contrived. I will give credit for:

- Commits to open source projects

- Answers on Stack Overflow

- Karma on Hacker News

I will also require students to write essays, however I will permit the student to submit blog posts as essays. I will use PageRank or upvotes by Hacker News to determine the letter grade awarded for the "essay."

View on HN

I wonder how long it will be before someone establishes a market for "aged and authoritative" user accounts on those sites.

Oh, wait...

Can someone fill me in here? Is there a marketplace for selling user accounts that I don't know about?

I do not have first hand knowledge of such a market, but the idea seems like a natural extension of the markets to sell matured player accounts for online games. If there's a benefit to having a well-seasoned reputation associated with a login, then there's a market for selling that login.

I've heard multiple cases of people selling Slashdot accounts with interesting/low user ID's on eBay, so clearly there's some market for that. It's a stupid product, but clearly the market is there.

I think that degree will have more value than a lot of degrees handed out in decent universities. I would definitely enroll!

  >> - Commits to open source projects

This is only adding value if you rate the value of the open source contributions.

  >> - Answers on Stack Overflow
  >> - Karma on Hacker News

These are essentially peer reviewed ratings, so the same comment does not apply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com