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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Do people “Ask HN” frequently to farm karma points?

Guess it's a good place to ask – what would be the point of farming HN karma anyway?

I guess on Reddit it might be considered a way of boosting the account's authority or whatever, but is there any impact to having high karma on HN?

If they want to downvote I think you need a certain karma level.

Do that with enough accounts and you can control the narrative on certain subjects such as downvoting/hiding all the Twitter news that is negative, or the latest FAANG layoffs?

Unlikely though. Perhaps to positively promote your new startup? But then you don't need karma for that, so I have no idea.

I think various privileges unlock at certain karma levels. I don't remember exactly but I think 500 karma is enough to unlock everything.

You can sell accounts with high karma, but your hourly takehome would be much less than minimum wage. Then again, I can't argue about Kubernetes at Burger King, so working for HN has its perks too

You should do an “Ask HN” about it and find out.

As long as its a viable discussion topic I don't really see an issue. At least it's not like Reddit's r/askreddit which is relentlessly inundated with the most absurd, or downright incomprehensible posts just for the sake of grinding karma points.

But yeah, they probably do.

Hm. One nearly every day. Some kind of journaling regimen or creative writing exercise?

It's actually an interesting question if it had asked what adjustments people have made. I literally yesterday bought a 100g £10 keyboard to see if I could travel for a week with just a tablet. The GaN charger was a win.

Aside from the question itself the posts seem pretty low effort. My experience is that a typical Ask HN has two or three paragraphs explaining the question in depth, why the question is important to the person asking, etc.

My favorite is Ask HN: Did you know you can submit polls?

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