What if submitting a story cost 1 karma?
Could this have the desired effect of reducing low-quality posts that the poster considers as such when posting? My habit is already only to post something that I personally want others to hear about, rather than 'maybe this will get a vote'.
It could potentially reverse the problem of so many stories being posted that so many don't even get to be seen and voted upon. It would also be great if some focus was brought back, tech is so much a part of everyday life that the intersection of tech and X is largely a general news feed.
Karma has no value at the moment. It's best that it remains this way.
I would however love to be able to bump up a post of my choice to the front page for every, say, 1000 karma points earned. Let it have above normal gravity (i.e. make it sink quicker), but a chance to promote a single post once in a while would be genuienly cool.
Edit - to clarify, I don't mean that 5000 karma will give 5 boosts. Just one. You use it, you then wait for another 1000 points to get this perk reinstated. Or even start raising the cost with each boost - 1k, 2k, 5k, etc.
Discouraging posting in general will decrease both the bad and good. That's bad.
I think the right focus is on increasing the amount of good content, not on decreasing the amount of bad. If you're focus is on the latter, you're more likely to put yourself in the situation of shooting yourself in the foot.
I like the idea, however, there are many accounts on here that have a significant amount of karma gained through auto-posting already, and that greatly impacts the effectiveness of such a proposal.
For the heavy auto-posters, let's say that out of 20 auto-posts, only 1 gets any traction. I would imagine that they would happily still take the hit of 20 points, in order to gain 50 or more points from the one good post.
On the flip side, people with low karma would become increasingly timid to take any risks, and may shy away from posting altogether.
I feel in the long run it would result in the karma-rich getting richer.
An alternative proposal could be more focused on penalising excessive karma farming. E.g. require a gap of at least 20 mins since last post, or subtract 50 points for every 0 point/0 comment story submitted by a user, but calculate this at the end of the month.
I don’t think the problem is making people think before posting. HNs /new has a lot of great content in there but most of it gets little attention, I think the problem is there needs to be a system that encourages voting especially on posts with lower karma. Most posts in /new just get 0-2 upvotes, if there were more people giving good content a boost it would improve the overall quality. As it is now the posts that rise to the top are sort of random, the posts that rise to the top seem to be purely on the basis of the time of day it was posted and the title.
Why would this stop people posting "votebait" to try and get upvotes, which sounds like your objective? I think it would mainly discourage people who post very frequently, few of whom seem to be posting crap. There is already flagging/killing as a mechanism to drop spam or off-topic stuff.
I'd like a way to award extra points for descriptive story titles - too many are esoteric/vague as to what they are really about.
There's only so much time in the day, I don't want to be clicking every link to really know if it's worth my time or not (and story votes alone can't do that).
Maybe related - voting rings are definitely a thing on HN. An acquaintance pinged me to upvote their blogspam once as it would help their startup, and it got enough from people they messaged to make the front page. Not sure how much anti fraud is on HN but that seemed too easy to me.
It's difficult topic, really.
First off - 1 karma is nothing
2nd thing if you increase this threshold, then you're going to lose content from people that arent active HNers
Well, it hurts me infinitely more when I post a story, it goes on the front page and no one up votes it. My play bang bang against a neural network is the perfect example. I've submitted it kind 6 times (3 times linking the game, 3 times linking the source code) almost 0 interest.
Makes me wonder if the project is week, the code is bad or anything worse...
I don't think this is needed. The quantity of post posted everyday is not very high. And most interesting articles will show up on the front page at point or another.
The second pool chance works very well
Source : I maintain a daily newsletter about non-upvoted blog posts of HN
If you want to do something like this, I think it needs to be more focused on quality posting.
Like a separate "posting karma". If many of your posts are successful, it's easier for you to post, or you get a higher starting post upvote count.
That would kill parts of HN - you could kiss `Ask HN` goodbye I think, as either new comers like to post those sometimes, or else someone wants to ask more anonymously so will create a burner account (so no points to post with).
How about looking at many vote the user's past post have received. If the recent posts average votes is below a threshold then you can't post. Perhaps with a way to redeem yourself.
Incentivising karma farming in any way would be a Bad Idea, I think. Getting karma is easy, just find a recent post on a recurring topic and echo the dominant opinion from last time.
I'm guessing this is implied, but if a user has 0 karma, this would mean they can't create a post until they get atleast one karma back (ie via a comment)?
It might work better to make it more expensive to post multiple stories in some period of time (say 6 hours). Or maybe just install a universal rate limit.
Maybe a minimum karma threshold as well ? It would at least prove the poster has familiarity with the culture of HN and what content is most relevant.
It would only discourage new users from posting stories but have no effect on users who have had their submissions hit the front page before.
No. Low quality posts is subjective. The story upvoting is sufficient to make sure that interesting stories percolate to the top.
Putting scores to things encourages system gaming, leading to unwanted side effects. See pagerank for example.
Could it be run as a consensual experiment for a couple days? Just to try out and learn about the effects?
Charging members (in karma) to post could work, but 1 karma wouldn't do it. Try 100.
I score a lot better than 1 point per submission so this wouldn’t affect me terribly.
How about submitting more than 1 story cost 100 karma within 24 hours?
this is not technical problem, you cannot solve this with tech.
you gotta have strong community and mods