What if your Karma was Currency? | Hacker News Reader

What if your Karma was Currency?

7 pointscolinsidoti6 comments

Just a quick thought... What if you were able to use your Karma to give multiple upvotes, instead of just one? If people agree (by also upvoting that post), you can earn additional Currency. If you assigned multiple upvotes where others downvote, you lose your currency.

In my head, it creates an interesting environment where the people that frequently "invest" their Currency correctly will earn an abundance. But that's fine if they're actually good at picking what I want to read.

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Your idea relies on karma having been earned because of your contributions here. It's just a number.

If you subscribe to the usual tech blogs and rush to submit (or in many cases resubmit) everything they publish indiscriminately you will get a lot of karma.

If you have your own site and dump every link you produce here you will get a lot of karma (unless or until the mods notice).

Assuming I was karma-rich and wanted more, I'd contact other high-karma folks and rig the system with them.

Certainly, the system would need to be unriggable.

There's a number of hiccups but nothing that strikes me as impossible to manage. You and your karma rich folks could "invest" in other posts as much as you'd like, but if the non-Karma rich don't offer a simple upvote, I don't see why you'd receive a return on your investment.

There'd also need to be some element of time, so the sooner you invested the more you can potentially make back. And perhaps if you invested too late, you still have potential to lose.

Are you trying to kill the independent mind and promote herd mentality? If things worked this way during the renaissance, Michelangelo would have died like Van Gough (broke and a total failure).

As PG has noted as well on many-a-occasion, the best ideas seem crazy at first.

What if HN displays the sum of the users' karma that voted up and down? What if we could see who voted?

What if karma was just based on up and down votes?

Wouldn't that be simpler and more fair?

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