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Comment by tom | Hacker News Reader

A few results I think we might see if pg were to try this experiment. 1. Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission. 2. Flatten the karma curve. Not sure what good this would do, though. 3. Help some folks get more work done as I wonder how some folks here get anything done with all the reading of, and posting of articles/content. I'd be interested to see how many, if any, "good" submissions were missed. Sure this is pretty hard to globally quantify, but if you want to post something, and can't as you're still in your 24 hour post post no post window, how long will it take for someone else to scoop you? I wonder if it will actually hurt the community (ie: missed content). I bet little of value would slip through the cracks, but some posts wouldn't attain the point heights that we see now as they'd be posted by regular folks, not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters.

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Refocus karma on discussion, as opposed to submission.

While the quality of discussion here is almost unrivaled (Business Spectator's conversation section is the HN of APAC business), not everyone is here for the discussion. This site is unrivaled as a news aggregator.

Why is a discussion worth more than a submission? Typically a great submission leads to an even greater discussion, but this is not always the case. And sure, we occasionally see low value articles accumulate a lot of points, but the same can be said for the odd low value comment.

not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters

With the exception of PG, who has long since removed himself from the leader board, we don't really see this too much.

As to the potentially missed content, perhaps you could submit multiple stories, but they'd go in a queue and only one story from your queue would be pushed public per day.

I think this is the best idea for the site's benefit but you'll get a lot of complaints from users based on the Karma factor.

I mean, what if you submit 3 stories and only the first gets published on that day. But someone else submits your third story as their one for the day and it becomes the most popular item on HN that day. Suddenly you're annoyed because you think you should have gotten those points.

Maybe you could have a queue but if someone else submits a story you got to first and was queued than you both get the karma points. There's nothing that says only one person can have the points for one story added to their total.

I don't think giving out karma for submitting articles is even the best idea, anyway. The only way you should get karma in my mind is by furthering the discussion of an article. Why should you be rewarded in some fashion just because you found something interesting on the internet? It isn't that hard to do compared to actually discussing it.

I disagree with that (and with endtime below).

The reality is that we don’t know how many good stories are submitted by those people trying to boost their karma points. Nor do we know for a fact that finding good stories is easy. So by taking those points away the community would risk lessening its effectiveness.

In fact, I’d argue that’s the most likely outcome. In my experience people work more effectively when they are being rewarded for their actions. That in mind I’d consider it more likely that those chasing points are the ones submitting the best story. So taking away the points for submitting stories could deprive the community of some of its best conversation pieces.

I could be wrong but since there’s no way to prove that either way

Yeah, of course all of this is opinion. We can't know anything without data, unfortunately. I just think the community would be best served if people had something interesting to say about what they were submitting rather than just trying to submit something that appeals to the general audience here. I think that just has too mcuh potential to lead to gaming the system without giving anything back other than a link.

Suddenly you're annoyed because you think you should have gotten those points.

Pardon my French, but who gives a shit? I'm more than happy for people who post for karma to be annoyed. The reward of posting an interesting article should be the discussion that follows. I'd much rather see rules for the good of the community than rules that play to individuals' vanity.

But why should we have always voted-up uber-submitters?

Shouldn't the upvotes be based on the merit of the post, not that of the poster?

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