Ask HN: Is there a point to HN points?

Sometimes, I like to look at profiles of posters, see how long they've been on HN, and page through a few of their comments to see how frequently they post. If they've been on for a while, post regularly, and have a low amount of karma, then they may have some controversial opinions that may be interesting to read.

The charitable answer is to crowdsource the ordering of links and comments. The cynical answer is to amplify the echo chamber.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At a certain number of points you can change the color of the banner at the top, so that’s pretty huge.

It's a form of operant conditioning, a means by which the community can reward and punish behavior, bias conversation towards certain forms of speech (high point comments sort to the top of the page - and there is by design no other way to sort pages) and censor others (downvoted comments are made purposely difficult to read.)

The intent is to separate signal from noise (although which is which is somewhat subjective, Hacker News is liberal in that there are no guidelines to downvoting, so "signal" is merely that which gets downvoted the least) and to passive-aggressively reinforce forum culture, because more direct methods of confrontation will just get you downvoted, filtered and eventually banned.

at lower levels you unlock feats and power ups,

higher levels are accumulations of hit points, all the while mods and demi-mods appear on occasion to level out grave injustices

Internet forums and social media are not real life

It's just another beauty contest.

they are not useless. Having more points means more privileges such as voting and flagging stories

Not really.