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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

It would be neat if HN could offer something like "Login By Facebook" that returned user/create date/karma. Would make a nice testbed for offering free stuff while having some high pass filter like "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."

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What about those of us with 10 year old accounts and <500 karma since we're quiet? :).

Exactly this. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to write a comment, quite exceptionally

Couldn't help but think of:

Brian Called Brian: You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! You're all different!

Man: I'm not...

yes, I'd personally say that a more interesting group is the subset of people with 10 year old accounts and karma between 50 and 500 points :D

AMA:)

There are plenty of us, not sure why we'd be an interesting group though?

Those should definitely also count. Yours, however, is only 9 years and 4 months old, so no free stuff for you!

I disagree. I rather have people post honest, thoughftul opinions rather than pander to a crowd with low quality feel good posts to get freebies.

It would be harder to gamify account age.

This is why I sometimes enjoy browsing a certain technology forum that shall not be named. It's all anonymous and you can bet that people will at least be honest with their feedback.

The most common hack for this has been verification using “about” field.

A website asks for your HN username, validated the age, gives you a random string to add to your HN about page.

Once done, your accounts are now linked!

And, positively or negatively, it offers a form of promotion for the website.

Not necessarily, if the token is just a random HMAC for eg.

I'm the only developer out of all of my colleagues that even knows what HN even _is_.

It's simultaneously surprising and yet also not surprising how niche HN really is.

I’m the only one who stuck to it. I’ve given the address to all my interns along the years (and my employee), none of the interns read it.

Perhaps that is why I’m the entrepreneur ;)

But they make me feel like a boomer. Why gets their info through plain text?!?

Sounds like this could lead to another Hacktoberfest situation where people just post low effort comments and posts on hackernews just so they can get over the threshold. And some people might even make tutorials.

Right. So it seems like if I were going to do it, it would have to be based on things that happened before any announcement. Like account age, comment/submission activity prior to announcement, etc.

How do you feel about the Stack Overflow solution to this problem?

My app has 300 features. Beginners get to use 8 of them. Once ten people think you are not a wretched toad, you get to use 20.

Once you've solved a problem for 200 people, you can edit other people's posts.

In fact doesn't HN not let you downvote until you get 500 upvotes? It's been a while.

It seems to work well. I am an occasional contributor so I don't have very much power there but I understand that communities collapse without this control since they get dominated by drive-by losers. I'm not one, but there's no signal I can provide that I'm not one. Metafilter has the model where you spend money as a signal that you're not one. I guess I'd pay $20 one-time as an upgrade that is revocable.

I am a Wikipedia auto-confirmed user, so that lets me make articles without needing to go through the process, so that's nice.

The problem with all of these sites is that they don't also police the opposite side: the obsessive guy who spends all his time on the site and attaches all of his identity to it so he is just a negative person despite having lots of 'karma'-equivalent.

It's like the value-to-community vs time-spent curve is like

    |           -
    |          - -
    |         -  -
    |        -    -
    |      --     -
    |    --        -
    |----           ---
    +----------------------
    |                  -
    |                   -
    |

In fact, maybe HN should have a high-karma warning. "This user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not the star of the pub"

> maybe HN should have a high-karma warning

My intuition is that this is less of an issue on HN than on Wikipedia.

I need to hire you to talk to a community member I'm having trouble communicating with. Good stuff.

This would have been a killer feature on dating sites around the time I was using them: some people were spending more time on those than there were hours in a day:)

At one point in time, I was contributing at Stack Overflow just for the fun of it, and I answered some fun programming questions. After a short time I ran afoul of some of the obsessive types that you describe, and that was the end of my time at SO.

"This user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not the star of the pub"

I'm medically handicapped and "have no life" which is why I spend so much time online. When I first joined HN (July 2009), I figured everyone on the leader board here was basically some loser with no life.

Not a big slam because I figured they were fairly intelligent losers. But I did figure "You people are spending so much time here for the same reason I am: You desperately need to get a life. (Only you seem to have less excuse than I have for your failure to get a life.)"

That proved to not be an accurate assessment of the situation.

Your point is not irrelevant, but I will suggest that karma count on HN is not a good measure of anything at all other than time spent actively posting on HN -- which, in some cases, is cumulative over many years and in some cases it is not.

Some people here certainly are "the town drunk." And some people with high karma are people who have been here a long time and contributed a lot of good stuff while setting their ego aside and so on.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.[0] Refer also the law of unintended consequences. [1]

Conveniently we have a natural experiment from a year or two ago we can refer to.

Stellar Lumens offered some free cryptocurrency to existing users, via Keybase accounts that leveraged external auth-equivalence (such as HN). It backfired spectacularly for all involved. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences

[2] I think this is it - keybase.io's original blog post (referenced at [3] ) is 404'ing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230611/https://keybase.i...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21758671

Did the Stellar Lumens offer extend to brand new accounts?

Edit: Ah, I see, people tried to find dormant HN and GitHub accounts. https://www.coindesk.com/stellar-tried-to-give-away-2b-xlm-t...

Yup, I couldn't find the details, but IIRC it was a combination of people generating new accounts in the hope of catching a second round, and the fact some people had signups for Keybase auth on only one or two systems, and also IIRC even if your Keybase account pre-dated the cutoff date, you needed three associated auth systems configured in order to qualify for the coin drop. So there was a huge surge in signups for Github & Hacker News to tick that box. Doubtless some surge was related to people hoping to get in on a (speculative) second drop date.

> "HN account > 3 months old and has > 500 karma."

This is kind of gatekeepy coming from an account that's not 10 years old yet. :-P

Ah yes: the old "HN karma == developer" myth.

No, just a stab at some kind of filter to offer something for free without an avalanche. It's imperfect, as any other filter would be. Perhaps account age and some activity existing before the announcement would be a better filter.

It’s probably not a bad selector for “people who’s usage of my tool will lead to sales down the road”

I would be totally into OAuth-type integration with HN that I could use to lock people out of my site.

Absolutely not, there are already people on HN pandering to the crowd just to get karma points, let's not make karma points more meaningless than they already are. This suggestion is so rich coming from someone with 34,500 karma points.

"This suggestion is so rich coming from someone..."

Meh. I made up a threshold I thought might keep abuse of a free service down for a testbed. I picked 500 since I thought that was the HN threshold for downvote ability. Sure seems to have stirred up the crowd though :)

It's interesting that I've using HN for nearly 2 years,yet today was the first time I checked someone's karma. Didn't know it was a thing.

That is a great idea, i could sell my account for a few thousand

It must not be difficult to reach ~2K karma using a GPT-3 comment bot in a few days.

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