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Comment by grumblepeet | Hacker News Reader

I did not know that you could make polls on HN and I’m also 5 karma points short of being able to make them. Besides that, I don’t think that I would make polls here, I value the good story links posted and the insightful replies, and often when I see polls in other places it just seems to ignite flame wars and low value discussions. It’s a good thing that it is obscure, long may it be rarely used!

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omg, I did not even know we have "karma" here (never looked at my "profile") I actually read HN to get away from stuff like that. Funny, perhaps people come to HN as most people here do not pay attention to those items.

You though you escaped, but karma eventually got you.

HN tries to curb the karma addiction by not showing the karma of comments (other than your own), while still keeping it as a proxy for reputation (both in the profile and to gate certain features, most notably the ability to downvote).

Not being able to easily compare yourself to others certainly helps, even if it isn't perfect.

How much karma do we need to downvote?

if i recall correctly, 500

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented is useful in figuring out these undocumented karma limits.

And i believe you can't downvote direct replies to your messages, which i think is great. Either you provide an answer, or ignore the comment. The downvote flamewars are avoided either way.

By far the most important for me is the absence of notifications. I avoid Reddit most of the time because there's no option to turn off notifications, or even clear notifications without reading them. Your only option is to click the button that takes you to the page with the reply to your comment.

Maybe i've missed something, but the only way i've been able to browse replies so far is via the threads?id=myself page. is there another way?

I use hnreplies.com

You can disable that element of the Reddit website using uBlock origin.

> or even clear notifications without reading them. Your only option is to click the button that takes you to the page with the reply to your comment.

As a "clear" feature, you can always open that page in a new (background) tab, let it load so Reddit thinks you saw it, then close the tab without ever looking at the content. No idea if this works on new.reddit, but it's possible on old.reddit.

Also seeing the whole thread started by your reply. Reddit notifications make it feel like a 1:1 conversation, while HN encourages true many:many threads

If you use Chrome, there's an extension called NoVote that removes a lot of Reddit noise including the notifications button: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/novote/kepihilioco... (Disclaimer: I manage this extension)

Karma on this site is more of a means to manage trolls, by way of leveraging the community's response to individual's posts that may over time show a pattern. Karma doesn't mean much here in terms of visibility - over time your best-voted comment might be at the bottom of a long thread. If you get enough, you can downvote but I'm wary of doing that outside of obvious trolling or maliciousness.

I'm glad you now got the needed karma to create polls :)

How much karma is needed?

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