Ask HN: Why do dead posts contribute to karma? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do dead posts contribute to karma?

6 pointsmojuba16 comments

One of my posts just got killed but karma I earned is still in effect. I think it should be fixed to reduce karma as well.

Edit: a little clarification. I think it's possible to abuse HN by submitting any crap, voting up with a few other accounts and earn karma this way.

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I think it's possible to abuse HN by submitting any crap, voting up with a few other accounts and earn karma this way.

There's some software that would start to notice this.

If someone were purely after karma, I think the best way to do it would be to submit not just any old crap, but a broad selection of mainly "off topic" stories from relatively high quality sites like economist.com, ft.com, wsj.com, nytimes.com and maybe some stuff like reason.com, which is bound to get some votes from the libertarian crowd prior to being killed. If you were steady about submitting lots of these links, a few would be winners, and the rest cost you nothing.

This is essentially the strategy followed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=robg

Lots of material, much of it good. Although plenty of it might be considered off topic by some, most of it's interesting, and gathers at least a few votes. And it's certainly not spam.

I take offense! I follow no "strategy". That's what I read daily outside of research and coding. I post the most interesting stuff because:

a) I follow a lot of great links and discussions here.

b) I've learned a ton in doing so.

c) I'm trying to give back in some way.

d) To me, that's karma but it has nothing to do with points.

Now, I do feel bad about not contributing to many discussions here. In general, I don't have much patience for that kind of back and forth. Furthermore I don't think I have much to add. But I'm certainly not worried about the "cost".

I'd love to know how many stories I've had killed as compared to other people and some site average and standard deviation. I see 7 out of my last 120 submissions (one was self-killed) or 6%. That seems okay and certainly not an outlier. Still, even those fall within my primary interests: brains, education, business and technology with some cultural stuff. Those interests may be overly broad to you, but they're simply who I am. If my failure rate here is only 6% then I have to conclude plenty are interesting (as in the guidelines) to folks here.

I didn't mean any offense, just that posting a lot of interesting material with a broad scope is a successful strategy. I tend to take a narrow view of what's hacker news, but that doesn't make your links uninteresting. If I had to categorize them, I'd say some were definitely on topic, a lot of them are fuzzy, and some of them definitely aren't, centered around anything with politics in it.

I didn't really think you did. But again, I'm just posting what I read and what I find especially interesting. Yeah, sometimes that includes politics (like you posting FT's endorsement of Obama). That's where I'm thankful for the community, and editors, killing things. Fuzzy is okay because, if necessary, it becomes categorical.

Still, just disagreeing on the facts, I find a 6% failure rate to be acceptable and much less than "some" or "plenty" imply. It's a small minority if you recognize your own solipsism. The community says me and my interests belong!

We are not a degrading culture of hackers. There is a reason why there is very minimal voting down of items. Its because if you see you have a bad article, don't submit it.

If your article just died, then grow and learn from it. Don't demoralize your self over it. If we give you negative points, its demoralizing you.

Also, you should edit your topic with Ask HN:Why do dead posts contribute to karma?

It gets more notice that way.

What I meant was spam rather than (slightly) irrelevant posts like mine. You can post any crap, give it a few votes from different accounts and earn karma that way.

And then what? Having high karma doesn't get you anything. Each post and comment seems to be judged on its merits, regardless of who is posting it (with the exception of pg, I suppose; but I don't think there is much concern with him turning into a spammer).

It's not a punitive measure when posts get killed. It may have been a fine submission, but off-topic for this site. (In this case, I think it's pretty obvious why it was killed.)

I think for the most part things get killed before they gain much, or any karma. I'm pretty sure there are accounts out there that are perma-killed which can't collect any karma anyways.

I think dead posts ought to be subtracted from karma:-)

Maths vs. physics view of the world ;)

Isn't karma lazy-loaded anyway? Sometimes it is hard to spot instantaneous changes in karma even for forum activity that is documented to change karma. Obsessing that much about karma probably is counterproductive. Just look for something better to submit, and learn from the examples of the best submissions of long-time submitters.

I love it how everyone here lives in fear of another september.

I would rather keep the site simple as it is now. I don't want any silly karma :-p

I think the whole thing would be hardly worth the effort to write something to manage the karma.

"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."

- Napoleon

Only so long as said soldier thinks that said colored bit of ribbon is thought meaningful by fellow soldiers.

How many of you think that HN karma is meaningful?

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