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Comment by suzzer99 | Hacker News Reader

Everything went downhill once people had real incentive (like actual money, not just internet cred) to game the system for reputation points. The mods had to come up with ever-evolving layers of rules on top of rules that lowered the answer quality and put up huge barriers for an average user to contribute.

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“It was a good measurement, until it became a target”

Incentives really make or break this type of website. Often on the internet I find myself thinking "Thank God this [website specific metric] isn't worth anything so people have no reason to game it".

I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments.

Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.

I think hackernews' system is still working. Though that might just be because it is small enough.

HN implements some significant limitations to the model that make it work. Things like not being able to downvote replies, can't edit / delete your replies after certain criteria are met, limited upvoting until a certain amount of contribution, etc.

These are constraints that limit the types of people that are interested in remaining here. But HN is by no means "small".

Twitter has recently added monetary incentives to create “engagement”.

I assume that there will be a decline in quality. It will become an interesting case study.

But it's pay to play over there.

So in short, gambling.

And the house always wins.

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