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My New Instant Karma Plan
50 points by bporterfield on June 11, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 66 comments
Hello HN. Not to boast, but I've devised a foolproof method to get more karma than you. Given that we're all members of the entrepreneurial community, I thought I'd share this method with my fellow colleagues, in hopes that they may derive some inspiration. So here it goes - my new Instant Karma Plan:

1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.

2. Write a simple script that, upon each update, submits that 37signals post as an article on HN, so that I'm the first to post it.

3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.

Whatdya think?



Please don't upvote stupid posts like this.


I think the point of the post is to express a slight frustration over stories ranking high simply because they come from specific sources, and the fact that many people seem to approve of these posts simply because of the source. If everyone that upmods actually thinks the posts are valuable enough to upmod based on the content and thinks that other users would benefit from the content, then that’s fine; it’s just that there’s a lot of great content out there, and it seems as though certain posts get upmodded more simply based upon the source.

The upvotes that people give this "joke" (it’s not really meant to be funny at all), regardless of how often they’ve heard it before, probably means that they agree with the sentiment, and as members of the same community have the option to make that vote as they see fit. Hopefully they don’t upmod because they find the post humorous. It’s meant to be commentary on the state of the community, and your negative responses only seem to validate the point further.

Interesting how the net’s anonymity results in much sharper criticism than you find the real world. For example, you would never call a joke stupid if someone you had just met told it, regardless of how many times you’d heard it before. Something to consider, especially given that we’re all here to focus on the same goal: learning from one another, gaining valuable insight, growing as a community. Not disrespecting one another.

I may not have been a registered user for very long, but I have read HN for quite a long time before that, and am just as immersed and interested in the startup community as any one of you. I agree that, if anyone cares about karma, a formula that gives karma based upon length of time they’ve been a registered member of the community is a cool idea.. I’m all for informative, excellent content, but I’m also not against a bit of humor, commentary, or just plain fun. What good is being entrepreneurial if you can’t have fun?

Now stop upvoting this post!


Ironically, the way the submission system works, if you submit a story that has already been submitted, it simply registers your submission as an upvote.

So think about it. If there are 20 HN readers out there with your rss submitter, then everything from 37signals would instantly have 19 points. This would most definitely instantly catapult the story to #1 on the front page, garnering it a lot of exposure and opportunity for more upvotes.

So really it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Twenty people all trying to submit the same story the instant it comes out results in a karma lottery for whoever randomly submits it first. The other 19 people will see the instant karma and try even harder.


This should trip pg's statistical abnormality observer, I would think...


You should've posted this originally, instead of the "joke".


I thought it was witty, and all things considered I prefer good ideas in witty packages to good ideas all by themselves. That probably explains why Joel Spolsky obtained some early popularity: many people found his posts entertaining and educational at the same time.


The problem is that online, when there aren't any vocal or body language cues to go by, people tend to take posts like this as snarky. I'm sure OP didn't mean it that way.


v. true, when in doubt, use emoticons :-)


Seriously folks. This is why I rarely visit Reddit these days -- because of posts like this.


Here's a better plan:

1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you

2. Make an interesting comment for that submission

3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment

4. GOTO 1


Fixed to avoid wrath from Dijkstra and the raptors:

   while (true) 
      1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you
      2. Make an interesting comment for that submission
      3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment


+1 Does that make me a "raptor"?


Yeah, I was going to write a bot do the same with xkcd, TechCrunch, and (especially) PG's essays.

The benefits are twofold: The community gets extremely quick exposure to content it seems to really appreciate, and no user gets huge karma just for being the first to submit PG's new essay.

Save the karma for people finding things you couldn't find yourself.

edit: Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here. I just wanted to post that I agree, despite not being new here and not being particularly hurting for karma.


"Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here."

Newness has nothing to do with it. We welcome and embrace newbies all the time.

They're probably dogging on his post because he has struck a sensitive nerve.


Okay, so this post may annoy some HN loyalists but it's also a reality that all communities need to deal with eventually. Keep in mind there is a high-probability that someone has already implemented this IKP.

Let's turn this lemon into a shandy and figure out what to do about it.


Easy option: Submissions from sites that always get upmodded don't add to the user's karma.


That comment gets an upmod for being a fertile suggestion: even if it doesn't work as-is, it provokes some thought about what behaviour we actually want to reward.

IOW, we are saying: "We hate most spolsky/coding horror/raganwald/..." posts, but from time to time there's a good one in there, so please ferret out the good stuff for us. Posting stuff from Paul Graham or Tech Crunch is not going to be rewarded.

Sounds suspiciously like re are rewarding risk-takers. That seems to be in the spirit of hacker news.


The next most easy option is to delay submissions by an hour or so. If two or more users submit the same URL in one hour then no-one gets credit. This would ensure that two or more bots monitoring the same blog would cancel each other. More generally, it would encourage more diverse content to be submitted.


Another option... make karma be worth nothing tangible whatsoever. Make people have to go out of their way to see how much karma another member has.

Oh wait... that's all covered. Karma is stupid, and nobody really cares except for when these dumb posts come up a couple times a month.


Option 2: Karma throttling.

This could also include a karma bank so that once it's determined you're not a bot or a moron, you'd get the karma you deserve.


WTH's a shandy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radler

lol - beer-flavored lemonade? Silly Europeans ;)


Option 1: Submissions by users created less than Q days ago or with less than R karma receive some fraction S of karma for each upvote.

(Q = R = 30, S = 0.1)


A submitted article has high visibility and has no risk to karma. Contributing to a discussion has low visibility and risks karma. An RSS reader and a bookmarklet makes article submission semi-automated but insightful discussion takes more effort. Perhaps there should be more points for discussion.


I'm sorry, what problem are you solving here? The problem of a new user writing a bot and hogging the karma? While allowing an "old hand" to do exactly the same thing and reap the rewards?

How very... feudal.


Great use of italics!

Anyway, the reward of getting from karma 1 to karma R is greater than from R to R + hogging. If a user is past R karma and then decides to hog, then they're a moron and we should do something about that too.

Any ideas?


No ideas, for the simple reason that I have a basic pessimism about trying to use carrots and sticks to create behaviour that is beneficial to a social group.

"We don't teach people to be nice, we hire nice people" --Leona Helmsley (sp?)

I think we can punish egregiously bad behaviour and we can moderate things, that eliminates outliers. But fundamentally our approach should be to encourage nice people to join and discourage trolls so that they leave.

It is not clear to me that karma is a good mechanism for that... if there is a game, some people will play for the sheer pleasure of winning.

I think the number one way to encourage nice people to use a social site responsibly is to swiftly and severly punish trolling. Nothing sends a message that you prefer signal over noise like banning noisemakers.

JM2C, doesn't really do much about bots.


Ya that doesn't do much about bots or trolls who enjoy being spanked.


> Whatdya think?

I think this represents a violation of the spirit of HN.


Yes it does. These kind of posts really bringdown the quality of the posts. HN used to be very informative - but these days, the quality of the content has gone down.


Whatdya think?

What's the point of karma? It's not money, it's not friendship, and it's not interesting; so who cares?


I do. Not because it makes me feel special to have a lot of it (I don't have but a handful of it) but because it serves as a measure of how you're contributing to this community.

A downvote should be a warning that you've wasted this community's time.

An upvote tells you your contribution was appreciated by at least some members and that you've contributed something useful.

Wanton upvotes (aka "karma whoring") simply tell you that you've figured out how to game the system.


Sure, but on most sites that have a "karma" type of system, it doesn't serve as that great of a measure of how you're contributing to the community - it serves as a measure of how much the community agrees with your opinions.

I mean if everybody only used the (up|down)vote arrows as a measure of how much something was worthy of submission, or how much a comment was contributing to discussion it would be great, but you can't rely on people to do that (and they often don't), so the meaning of karma approaches nil.

HN seems to be a bit better about this than most sites with such a system (reddit and slashdot particularly), but I suspect that's because its user base is (or was, I'm not too sure recently) pretty small.


It's cheaper than sugar water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning


Is it so hard for people to accept that the reason 37s, Joel, pg, Atwood, Maroon, Raganwald, etc became popular is that a) they wrote a lot and b) people liked it? All of them (well, Maroon is more recent) have been doing this for 4+ years, with several hundred to over 1,000 posts. These heavy producers are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the good written content on the web. Sure, there are other sources of good (maybe even better) writing, (Moserware is a current favorite of mine) but they haven't been writing for long and don't write much so they get seen as often. How many things on the top 30 are more than 2 days old?

This is just like saying "I'm sick of hearing about all those startups in Silicon Valley - I only want to hear about startups from other places."


"Karma" is just an integer in a database. I can't image many people here really caring about that.


Your bank account is just a float in a database.


I hope it's not, too many rounding errors


PG, where can i exchange my karma points for real karma?


You need to play more MMORPG's. It's amazing how much people care about integers in databases going up.


I don't even see the code anymore; just blonde, brunette, redhead...

(In all seriousness, the karma number quantifies the approbation of your peers; and a good reputation is highly valued by most people--and rationally so, I'd say).


As a new user who hasn't yet contributed much to the community, don't you think your post is rude?

  user    : bporterfield
  created : 30 days ago
  karma   : 38

  8 comments, 1.50 points per comment [searchyc.com]
That said, you may want to use http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u... to blacklist the sites you don't want to see.


He may be a new user, but already understands the way things work here at HN, anything from 37, PG or Maroon is automatic karma. I think most people that are upset are mad that our little karma formula is so easily diagnosed.


I meant that he hasn't given us much value but is liberal with criticism about 'how things are'. But looks like he was just joking.


I did that with xkcd a while back, and asked the community if I should take it down. The general consensus was yes, so I did.

Karma isn't really important, what's more important is improving the community and quality of submissions. It's better to have people manually submit every post from a particular feed, since eventually you'll hit a few posts that aren't really relevant, and those will be left out, helping the signal-vs-noise ratio (pun intended).


So you are leveraging the meta-karma of 37 signals to gain your own karma? Devious.

Sarcasm duly noted.


63 comments and you're the first to notice! I've finally found my co-founder.


Sounds good.


Forget karma. The real question is whether or not the articles submitted bring value to the community. I submitted two 37 Signals articles because I found them interesting, and on topic for the community.

I think it is instructive to consider if most of the negative commentary regarding the 37 Signals submissions would disappear if the source was different (eg, they came from author X instead).


Wow this joke has never been told on any karma-based message board ever. How witty. Did you think about telling it again on Slashdot about Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala? They'll get a kick out of it.


I saw this about a minute after it was posted. I hoped at the time it wouldn't get upmodded. We need a downmod.


This is starting to seem more common. Posts I see under new section that make me cringe inevitably shoot up to the top of front page. And seems like an increasing number of good posts are getting drowned out.

Agree downmod would be helpful. Even if it had a very high karma or HN usage period requirement in order to use I think it would help the community.


This might explain some of the recent test posts ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213701 ).


If a site is over-submitted, maybe further submissions from that site shouldn't accrue karma to the submitter. That is: "No cherry picking." Articles would still appear and their placement still depend on votes, but there'd be no narrow personal value to submitting them.

Initial candidates for such no-credit status: TC, PG, 37, CH, XKCD... though the list could be dynamic based on number or popularity of recent submissions.

(Crop rotation for mindharvests?)


Instant Karma's gonna get you...


There are better ideas out there.


Someone downmodded that - you disagree, or the comment's simply not relevant or it is feeding the troll, who I think is actually quite serious?


I'd imagine that you got downmodded for not suggesting some of these other ideas in combination with not providing a link or two for reading about these other ideas that are better.


I downmodded both.

If you want reasons, here they are: 1. Your original comment was of no value. 2. In general, replying to your own comment to indicate that your original comment was downmodded gives me more reason to downmod you.


"Your original comment was of no value."

Not everyone's as smart as you, maybe the poster needs it said to him/her.


Instant karma's gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon you're gonna be dead

-John Lennon


I think that the more recent the person has registered, the more likely their posts are going to be flamebait.


One acronym for you: GTFO


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g anyone? anyone?


interesting that, not only did i take a really huge hit in karma for a joke, that my other recent comments also went down uniformly as well, in what appears to be retaliation.

thats pretty lame. i guess no jokes allowed on YC, even (imo) good natured ones.


Congratulations! You just guaranteed I will never upmod your stories or comments.


Sounds good, make sure you keep your stats up though:

http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield




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