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Comment by BrentRitterbeck | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about the whole "karma" concept, so don't take my question as an attack. Is a meaningless number so important to you that you would value it over knowledge? It seems you were almost on the edge of not asking simply because you thought you might be downvoted.

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The whole point of karma is to have meaning and to discourage users from posting a certain type of comment or question. Googling just "PoC" or "software PoC" pretty immediately answers his question - my guess is this is why the downvotes happened last time. I probably wouldn't downvote a question like this, but I can see why others would discourage it.

I can understand that, but it's just a number. My opinion of someone is not going to be any different if their karma is 1 versus 10000. Why would someone worry about that when they have a legitimate question that they want answered? The only thing I use karma for is to decide if something is worth reading. Chances are that if it has been voted up highly it's probably worth reading.

In theory, signal gets upvoted and noise gets downvoted. If I get downvoted, my post was probably noise. I don't want to increase the noise level, and I accept that I may not be the best judge of my own comments' quality.

It makes sense to care about karma as an indicator of whether the community thinks my contributions are good or not.

Yeah, but my point was that it's the same as being afraid to ask a question in class because the question may be viewed as stupid. There's no such thing as a stupid question. I think it's kind of silly to worry what people think about your question if it is a legitimate question.

There may not be such a thing as a stupid question, but there are definitely people that not ony think there is, but that I emotionally value the judgement of, even when that judgement is bases on invalid logic. To point at a pop-psychological basis, pretend it was your father that said "that's a stupid question." You might argue against it to hell and back, but there's no way you would be unaffected by the statement.

Yeah, but my father is not one of the people on Hacker News.

EDIT: These are just normal people, albeit a group of successful entrepreneurs. We've all had things we wish knew. If you have a question, why not ask it?

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