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Comment by abricq | Hacker News Reader

If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.

It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.

For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.

One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.

View on HN

You can see a form of this effect on HN itself, in particular in Show HN topics.

First few comments basically set the tone of the discussion and its dynamic. If they are shallow, negative or dismissive, the discussion gets stuck and takes a while to recover even if the submission has a lot of actual merit.

Similar with stackoverflow. A question with an answer is already uninteresting to other contributora, but if the answer is superficial or of bad quality on top of that, it lowers the chances of a good second answer dramatically.

This is from personal experience, not from any study, so take it with a ton of salt.

On the other hand it can recover. I am not going back to reading sequential pages on a forum. Good enough until something better comes along.

This is not a study but a reality for me. At one point on HN I wanted to farm for karma points. That period lasted for a few weeks, I wasn't too intense about it, just a fun question I had.

My tactic? Find something that has something like 15 upvotes and you suspect to be rising quick in upvotes. Create the first comment and your best to make an as thoughtful comment as possible, even if you don't know anything about the topic.

Result: I was always within the top 3 getting between 10 to 50 upvotes.

One idea I have (just brainstorming) force users to make a vote first of 10 random products and only after they see the results.

It could probably use some UX tweaking since forcing someone to vote isn't quite nice, but at least it takes care of this effect that was described.

I feel like that was gaming the system in the spirit of https://xkcd.com/810/

Serious question: what motivation was there?

AFAIK points aren't worth anything and don't unlock anything after the first few, probably to help block spam/bots.

It's exceedingly rare that I even click a profile here, and even then it's usually to see what a person works on not how many points they've accumulated.

In fact, there are many cases where the most knowledgeable person on a subject comments, I click to see who they are, and realize they've only ever commented a few times. I imagine they either mostly lurk, or have an idle account they just use when friends drag them into the conversation.

> Serious question: what motivation was there?

Curiosity, what else? It was for a few weeks, I get curious about many things.

Points to me is a light positive signal that they are "a part of HN". I've seen a similar effect as you with many low point HN commenters. So I don't see low point as a negative sign, but high points definitely as a light positive sign (i.e. you can assume they read the guidelines, etc.).

Thank you for the suggestion. I have implemented something like this but still experimenting with different factors.

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