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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why HN karma can't be a proxy for the kind of behavior one should expect on lobsters. Or, I guess maybe they're actually looking for the kind of folks who will hoop-jump to get on their site

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From their about page, it seems they very much do not want to be like HN:

> Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, anthropology, self-help, personal productivity systems, last-resort customer service requests via public shaming

Anyone can get karma on HN by submitting links. Some people farm karma by posting links to words on Wikipedia. The bar to obtaining karma is very low in my opinion.

99.9% of my karma is from comments, hardly any of the links I post get more than 2-5 points. Likely I'm just really boring.

I see you submitted one that affects a number of people and it caught their attention. There are quite a few Googlers here. Most of my submissions get the same 2-5 points, I just do it almost every day as part of a routine and once in a while I find something that affects a large number of people on HN. There came a point where I started ignoring karma using uBlock as it was influencing my interactions.

>I've never understood why HN karma can't be a proxy for the kind of behavior one should expect on lobsters.

Because karma doesn't actually indicate what it's meant to. People don't just upvote comments for their intellectual quality and civility, nor do they downvote comments just for their rudeness and banality. All karma really measures is interaction over time, and high karma if anything is a sign that someone has nothing more productive to do than hang out here.

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