Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

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A site like HN is basically a group of insiders, namely folks who have decided what is smart and what is not. So the system ought to favor insiderism and reject power from newcomers.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note: I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the above might already be in effect.

I think this is by far the best idea that I have heard on this thread. We know that the ability to remove features based on karma is there (due to the inability for new people to downvote or most people to start polls), so why not remove the ability to upvote for people under a certain threshold of karma.

I think this would also alleviate the issue of having people upvote stores on the front page as a sort of bookmarking feature. I have strong opinions that many of the upvotes on the front page come from new people who are using it as a bookmarking feature and not a bestowment of karma to a good post.

I really like this idea. However, I'm not sure if it is solving the trolling problem. Most troll comments I've seen come from "throwaway" accounts -- one post, and then not used again. These trolls presumably don't care about being able to vote or not.

I like what Twitter is doing for their (IMO, similar) spam account problem. Users flag for review and block updates from suspected spammer. We already have flagging, but we don't have blocking. It would be nice to be able to selectively hide specific comments or users (perhaps behind a "[blocked]" tag, like deleted comments are done now), so existing users at least could more easily ignore these trolls.

Account banning could be done by voting. Once an account is flagged, it gets added to a list of suspect accounts. Users (potentially above a karma threshold) can vote on these accounts based on their usage history; if enough people flag and confirm these accounts as spam they will be deleted, with their posted comments masked under a "[spam]" tag.

I honestly think this is the best way to do it. I've been a lurker on hacker news for a while now for the occasional article that doesn't involve business tips (most of them are bogus). In addition to what you said I think that maybe that users could be sorted into groups by upvote/downvote correlation, and that users with a higher correlation to you would have a greater weight on the tiering of your articles.

second that - current members have moral right to preserve the intent of the site.

Id make upvote power logarithmic in Karma, vis -

    upvote = K log( karma )
    dnvote = K/4 log( karma )

which would imply a certain Karma before you could upvote at all, and a larger karma before you could downvote at all.

Not sure how to solve karma hunting, but that's orthogonal, and a smaller issue.

Id weaken downvote power because it is more damaging when used, and also because it seems to act in a way to reduce freedom of speech : people may be scared to speak the truth due to fear of losing karma, which devalues the site. Id almost prefer not to have downvotes, but there are comments I might want downvoted [racism, personal abuse, religious bigotry etc]

That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.

I think story submission is a really important way to add to the HN community. New users who can contribute what the community thinks are interesting articles are valuable users. Plus, if new users cannot vote until receiving a certain karma threshold, stories would only be upvoted by users with some familiarity with HN culture.

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