Ask HN: What are the HN karmic privileges/penalties?

At 400 you get to downvote.

At 401 you get to apologize for accidentally downvoting someone.

At 419 you get lucrative business opportunities.

At 420 you get baked.

At 451 you get [deleted].

At 777 you get lucky.

At 1337 "they" teach you the Secret Handshake Deal Protocol.

At 1999 you have to update a million lines of COBOL in order to advance.

At 2010 you get to complain that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

At 2600 you get to make free long distance calls.

At 3003 you get your TI-83 taken away and returned to you at the end of class.

At 4352 you get to get to post a jokey self-referential comment without anybody complaining that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

This is inaccurate, and just the sort of post you would expect nowadays on HN. It's turning into reddit.

While I strongly object to jokes and mindless comments on serious topics, there's really not a lot to say or any interesting discussion to be had on this particular subject.

Lightly mocking that doesn't really detract from anything, not on this post.

That was my thinking as well, this post is light enough that we can all unwind and joke around.

Completely agreed. Tenuously on topic, if Hacker News had - shudder - badges, then today I would have earned something like "Lightweight: posted something of sufficient triviality to attract a joker".

To be fair, it's not exactly a new trend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129

Apparently the final level was recently increased.

At 404 you get Not Found.

At 501 you get to go home.

At 666 you get a calibration score. (As in Evil, Google Being? Ok, I tried.)

At 1024 you get a non-reserved port number.

At 32768 any 16-bit hardware you have is personally signed by Paul Graham.

"At 4352 you get to get to post a jokey self-referential comment without anybody complaining that Hacker News is turning into Reddit."

[url=dwight.jpg]FALSE[/url]

I'm at 7595 and I got called out for this just recently [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542609 ].

As for "negatively impacting your ability to interact with the site", that refers to the practice of slowbanning and hellbanning. Slowbanning is what it sounds like - the site will be slower for you, sometimes just a little and sometimes a lot. The idea there is to subconsciously encourage you to visit the site less and to contribute less when you do. Hellbanning is more extreme. When you're hellbanned, nothing you contribute will be visible to anyone else, but it won't look like anything's wrong to you. (However, people with enough karma can elect to see your contributions regardless. This is why you'll sometimes see people kindly pointing out someone's hellbanned state.)

"Slowbanning is what it sounds like - the site will be slower for you, sometimes just a little and sometimes a lot. The idea there is to subconsciously encourage you to visit the site less and to contribute less when you do."

That's hysterical. Hellbanning I'd heard of, but that...that's brilliant.

Thanks very much too for directly addressing that specific bit of my OP :)

It might be, up until the point where you're on the receiving end of it.

That's really interesting to know. I'm very curious about the technical aspects of slowbanning - how is this accomplished without "wasting" valuable server resources?

I've asked a somehow related question[1] on stackoverflow but got no replies... maybe this can help solve the mystery?

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131671/throttling-http-...

My inference (from hellbanning and rumors of a unique YC alumni topbar) is that there is a closure over each username. If that is the case, then http requests can be assigned various priorities within the queue...or the closure could include something equivalent to:

  (let ((sleep 1000)...

Closures would certainly be a lispy way of doing things.

The one thing I wish had more transparency is the inconsistency around reply-delays. Some people get less time than others.

Between the "average karma" statistic (I used to care about that and avoid posting non-primaries; now I don't care) and reply-delays, HN penalizes nested discussions, and that's probably a good thing for most discussions but it does have drawbacks.

"Between the "average karma" statistic (I used to care about that and avoid posting non-primaries; now I don't care) and reply-delays, HN penalizes nested discussions, and that's probably a good thing for most discussions but it does have drawbacks."

Interesting. I don't think I quite follow how "non-primaries" (which means..."replies"?) harm one's average karma statistic, and how the average karma statistic + reply-delays penalise nested discussion, could you clarify?

"Primary" means a post that is primary in the thread. I suppose it would have been clearer to say "reply" instead of "non-priamry".

Your average karma gets hit because primaries tend to get much higher karma than replies-to-replies-to-replies that few people read. My primaries probably average 15-20, but I have a lot of 1-pointers in nested discussions that I think are better than the 50+ primaries.

Got it! Thanks.

I'm not sure what level you have to be at to get the ability to Flag stories. I do know that using it too much will get it turned off for you (as that happened to me). I had been assuming that Flagging stories was the right thing to do (as they don't have downvotes, and we're told not to comment negatively on them), but apparently you can have too much of a good thing!

Can anyone(PG?) comment what's the point of non-disclosing e.g. how that search ordering is calculated?

Or any other aspect of this site (if there are any other)...

So far, it looks to me like the secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

Maybe it is hidden deep in the source code (https://github.com/wting/hackernews), the problem is that Arc is basically unreadable if you're used to stuff like C/C++/Java/PHP/Assembler.

Is that the latest source? I didn't realise it was available but when searching HN before posting the topic I did find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964 ("Tell HN: How to find karma thresholds in the HN source code") so perhaps if things haven't changed much in the intervening 1298 days it'll still work.

It might be the meat of it, but IIRC pg has said that he tweaks key algorithms like comment ranking on his own.

The core concepts are in the Arc source code (which I can read, with effort, even though I'm not a programmer, because it is well commented) but as another reply has already correctly pointed out, some of the current implementation on Hacker News includes "secret sauce" algorithms that don't appear to have any public documentation. The ongoing effort here

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

is "making a conscious effort to resist decline," so that participants "don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

I'd offer a comparison to my behaviour on Yahoo! Answers, where they clearly laid out the permissions attached to the various levels (http://answers.yahoo.com/info/scoring_system), and as such I only actively engaged on the site until I achieved the level I wanted.

By not disclosing the values, we don't have goals to hit. And without those tangible goals, we're forced to focus on the journey rather than the destination.

There have been (still are?) aggressive voting rings active on HN. These rings are harmful to the site, artificially raising stories.

There are people who's only involvement in the site is to submit articles that they have written on their blog.

Not disclosing how the site works makes it a bit harder for those people to game HN.

Another factor in ranking of comments (apart from "average karma" of the poster, and of course the points it's received) is simply its length! The longer, the more it counts. I think it's there to promote deep and lengthy discourse, not one-line, "Stupid article. I stopped reading at [x]" kind of comment.

Source: experience.

I didn't realize changing the color of the top bar was a karma-sensitive bonus -- when I first heard about it, I checked and it was already in my profile. So: it's not for super-high karma users only!

I got comment downvoting at 500 karma, I think; and my karma is still < 1K, but note that the downvote limit may now be 1K (I'm assuming they don't revoke the ability from users in the gap every time they bump the level).

AFAIK there's nothing special waiting for me at 1K (or any other level), though I admit I'd be slightly encouraged to participate more if there were.

If your karma is high enough, you can downvote stories.

Must be a pretty high up privilege then.

Not that high up; I'm able to downvote stories.

The ability to spread misinformation requires > 10K, though, I think.

Haha, nice one!

@elliott: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoteart...

That's what I figured, thanks ;)

> AFAIK there's nothing special waiting for me at 1K (or any other level), though I admit I'd be slightly encouraged to participate more if there were.

I know what you mean. I'm mostly glad there isn't because karma-farming is probably harmful for HN.

There are a few people who submit a lot of articles from mid-quality sources. Sometimes they get lucky and those articles get many upvotes; mostly those articles just get a few votes. But it only takes a few people doing this to flood (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest) and that's a shame, because it means I miss the great articles from obscure sources.

Someone had a show HN recently which removed all the dross. It was called something like 'lessmeme'.

Maybe some filter so that all the traditional blog sites get aged quicker than other sources might help?

I don't understand this obsession with how this site works. You shouldn't be worrying about karma or why things are made [dead]. Just contribute the most interesting stuff and things will take care of themselves naturally.

> I don't understand this obsession with how this site works

Isn't this hacker news? If we don't obsess about how things work, who will?

Hahaha. OK, point taken!

I thought that sounded reasonable until I considered "You shouldn't be worrying about X or why Y. Just contribute Z and things will take care of themselves naturally". I agree with the X and Z parts for some values, but think I disagree with the Y part outright. Always question why!

You and the other guy are of course right. Maybe I've just clicked on too many Ask HNs recently that had to do with things about how HN works.

I may not agree with it totally, but I think it's good that someone said it!

Downvotes currently require > 500 karma. Topbar color change is maybe 250.. I don't remember exactly.

Aha! I think it is 250. I recently passed that, and after your post clicked my username to check...voila it's there. This will keep me amused for the next 2~20 minutes.

How can the top bar color change be of any use?

I just set mine to 212121 and, rather topically, now I can't make out from the top right corner how much karma I have. I suppose that could be used to remind a person that they've got work to do instead of checking if anyone has upvoted their stuff.

Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day.

A few months ago downvoting seems to have appeared at around 1000~ for me.

"Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day."

Not quite. I'm asking what the privileges/penalties are, which I believe can be listed. An additional second column for the accompanying thresholds, sure, they change so maybe not.

No way the admins will release that. It would be a goldmine for spammers. Just get their account up to X karma and it is worth twice as much for resale.

The problem will just be to get enough karma. Imagine 1000 karma as target, which 'd require to create quite a lot of different users to not trigger any automated spam filters; also the to-be-upvoted account would need to post good, relevant content so that those with enough karma don't flag or downvote it.

Right. I feel we're talking past each other a bit here. The topic is titled "Ask HN: What are the HN karmic privileges/penalties?" - this question is reasonably answered by returning a list akin to the following:

"Comment Downvote, Poll Creation, Topbar Colour Choice, ..."

The topic as stated does not ask for the thresholds. I mention in the body "correspondingly definitive "price guide"", but that's a separate afterthought.

> "No way the admins will release that. It would be a goldmine for spammers."

Or microsoft sycophants - a growing problem on HN (just ask @cooldeal, @recoiledsnake and @fekberg).

You're overstating this, I think.

How much would a downvoting HN account be worth, really?

Sure, a spammer could sneak in a few messages at a more visible level, or presumably down-vote their competitors, but the suddenly-abusive account would get shut down pretty swiftly.

On other hand, the work required to get an account up to a significant level (say, 500+) is non-trivial, cannot be outsourced to a minimally-trained mouse-clicker, and wouldn't run cheap.

It's not clear to me how it would help a spammer to know what the limit it, given that it's high enough that the work is not worthwhile.

Downvoting appeared at 500 for me a few days ago. (502 was the first time I noticed it.)