> Is it just me or is it a cheap way to flood the front page for a bit of karma?
It's just you. As soon as somebody determines why HN karma is worth a damn, then it's a problem.
It's just you. As soon as somebody determines why HN karma is worth a damn, then it's a problem.
And because of that, "cheap ways to get a bit of karma" matter, because by their definition they are acts of people who are valuing karmic return over quality of submission, resulting in low-quality discussions that appeal to our lowest common denominators, not to our curiosity.
edit:
To take the discussion further... First, I wouldn't neccesarily say that polls are a cheap way to get karma. Is karma meant to be a reward for effort, or for value? Sure, a poll might get more points per minute it took to create than a great blog post or Show HN post, but it doesn't neccesarily mean it was less useful to have on HN. And in comments we don't discriminate, I've seen plenty of extremely-short comments get high upvote numbers.
And finally... while some people may be motivated more by karma than anything else, is this automatically a bad thing? Arguably if a poll (or anything else) gains the user karma, it is (in theory) a sign that what they submitted was good content, and therefore better that somebody submit it to get karma than for nobody to bother at all.
This is good actually, because rude or completely pointless comments are severely downvoted, this being the punishment instrument that the community has for people that break the guidelines.
Add me to the list of people that really don't give a damn.
It would be interesting to see a list of the 10 most-downvoted comments. (I might have multiple entries.) Some things just need saying: People who will say them and endure such ignominious downvotes might well have a bit more experience than the avg user here. They say them to plant seeds in less-experienced folks, knowing that it may well take years to germinate.
And me.
There is a lot of value in expressing opinions which go against the grain, even if they are not easily accepted. It's only through honest debate that the truth can be found.
While HN's voting system is superior to that of other social news sites, I still think that the down arrow should have a "report" link instead to make people think twice about down-voting someone's opinion, assuming that the opinion is honest. Upvotes are harmless, assuming that spam is taken care of, and I see no problem with that aspect of the behaviour of such a system.
Personally I would generally care about being downvoted because generally I don't comment anything that I would expect to be downvoted, and therefore if it does it annoys me to know that either I was wrong in my judgement of what I said, or that the downvoter was wrong in how they read it (or that the downvoter is just an asshole - the ultimate conclusion I always come to when wondering why somebody downvoted me!)
But I'd never care about it as more of a signal of how a comment was received... if I felt there was a valid reason for me to reply with a one-word comment to somebody simply saying "Cunt." then knowing that I would be downvoted wouldn't come into it.
So far I don't think I've ever written that comment on HN, but I have written a few that I expected to get quite a few downvotes for - often accurate expectations, occasionally completely wrong. And as long as I know that they're downvoting for the reasons I expected, not that I've said something I wish I hadn't, I'm fine with that.
edit: How ironic that in this discussion you got downvoted for a useful comment.
:) That certainly wasn't my intent. The usefulness of upvotes is that the most useful information goes to the most readable place. (Usefulness being defined by the number of upvotes!)
Having a history of providing useful information might be good for somebody's personal ego, to which I say: Get a life. But does anyone here bother to look at somebody's karma count and say, "Now THAT person needs listening to!"
However, getting negative karma hurts, for some reason. Often if I'm down voted, I assume I've done something wrong and either try to fix my comment or remove it altogether.
I hope no one down votes this comment down just to see if I remove it. :)