This is the second (and probably most interesting) part of a series I’m trying to write talking about how we can use the HN/Lobseters mechanics to accidentally destroy and toxify our communities.
I hope this serves to illustrate why (on Lobsters) I complain about certain things (like news) as much as I do, and also to provide food for thought for people that want to imlpement similar sites.
As soon as I’ve got the third part (how can sites counter this behavior), I’ll put that up.
If anyone sees some obviously broken things on my little blog (aside from SSL, yes yes I know), please let me know in the comments or via PM if appropriate.
Thanks!
Out of context, upvotes and karma are meaningless metrics. If I write a comment on Haskell and get to +8, that probably means that I wrote a good comment. If I write on one a cultural issue and get the same score, it doesn’t mean as much because a much larger pool of people up- and downvote those. On Reddit, it means absolutely nothing. I’ve had junk comments get three digits and great comments get downvoted.
I’ve never heard of anyone farming Lobsters karma and I fail to see a point in it. As for Hacker News, I could see why someone would want to farm karma, so let me make a bold statement. Most of the top-100 people would not get funding from Y Combinator. There are some whose criticism of YC and venture capital have got us banned (raises hand) and many more who simply get nods of disapproval. In general, though, having 30,000 karma isn’t going to endear you to Paul Graham. Plenty of people on the 20k+ list (including people whom I respect highly) have been marked as unfundable, because it doesn’t take much to hurt PG’s wittle feewings.
If you want to get YC funding through your Hacker News activity, you probably want to post bland, pro-establishment, cheerleading posts in volume. Strategic shitposting works toward that end, but only if it’s pro-establishment shitposting.
As OP recognizes, you’ll get more votes and visibility per-post with incisive criticism (before I got hit with “rankban”, which is Hacker News’s manipulation of comment placement so that upvotes don’t get you to the top page, I was reliably top poster on HN threads, even if I came 2 hours late). You won’t get the kind of visibility that you want, you’ll be distrusted if not loathed by some of the most vindictive people in the Valley, and now that “rankban” is a commonly-used feature, you won’t even have much of a platform because rankban sends your posts into the lower-middle (because, as noted, bottom comments get more eyeballs).
I tend to find karma useful to differentiating (a) new users from (b) not new users. Other than that, it doesn’t seem that useful. I know that people used to farm Wikipedia accounts, get sysop privileges, and them sell them to politicians and business people who needed more control over their online reputations. I don’t think that a 20,000-karma YC account buys you anything, and most people don’t get to that point without unintentionally (and sometimes unknowingly) making enemies.
It’s kind of funny to me that people do post for karma’s sake, but that’s largely irrelevant. I am just commenting to point out that karma count doesn’t necessarily mean new user/old user. I’ve had this account for 2 years and I only have 57 points! I don’t really comment very often, but I do read.
Unpopular opinion time: the comment threads found on the Wikipedia articles and general-interest politics/economics/science/technology articles on HN are another major reason why the perception of the community on that site is so negative. In my experience, the most obnoxious commenters on those threads tend to be users whose contribution to threads about computer science or software engineering-related topics is minimal, low-quality, or nonexistent.
There are at least three distinct sub-communities on that site (although there are probably more, and overlap certainly exists): domain experts/professionals/enthusiasts looking to talk about software-related topics, entrepreneurs (real or wannabe) and the less-technical folks associated with the startup ecosystem, and the general interest “I’m a smart person who knows something about computers so my opinion on unrelated topics is certainly worth listening to” dilettantes. The types of articles each sub-community submits are different, as are the comment threads within which they engage and the level of respect they are willing to accord to participants.
I’m not sure if HN has changed drastically over the years or if I’m just noticing it more, but I have trouble going to that site and reading through comments. There are so many people who have every solution you’d ever need for any problem, but have zero research or real sources to back it up.
Half of the content is weird lifestyle/health articles or “how I (..) and why you should (..) too” blahg posts that are completely pointless. A lot of ego stroking goes on over there.
As bad or toxic as you claim them to be, I find the humorous (and sometimes snarky) comments and jokes to be part of the appeal of using an aggregator vs any news site (but of course I also enjoy the good comments asking questions and going on details etc etc),
I usually prefer browsing this place over HN because the general attitude towards things in general (you can’t really do anything on HN without someone going on how there is no viable business model or something).
To me things like humor (and generally shitposting) is what makes an aggregator feel more like a community than just a list of news with your average market analyst in the comments. I’ll take tedu’s short jokes over all the detailed “how I made 10 startups and sold them for ferraris” comments on HN every day.