

Ask HN: What if karma was worth real money? - the_cat_kittles

Would that do anything useful? I thought it might scale the influence of opinions to the esteem of the community member, since people with lots of karma would be able to upvote more. Also, I like the idea of giving someone more than just an intangible gesture of gratitude.
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evincarofautumn
As a blogger, I can tell you it already is. When one of my links gets karma,
it gets attention, and attention can be transmuted into revenue through the
magic of advertisements.

But for me, blogging has nowt to do with making points nor money—I’ve only
made a total of like $50 this year from the many hours I’ve spent writing. If
I cared about money, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on my blog and vlog. What I
do care about is having fun, making my ideas heard, and talking with new and
interesting people.

Upvotes tell me how relevant my ideas are to the real world and other people’s
interests, which in turn helps me become a better writer and a better thinker.

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anigbrowl
Sounds great, feel free to send your spare cash any time :-)

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moocow01
If karma was real money I doubt anyone would ever post anything controversial
in that you could lose your shirt.

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billpatrianakos
How? I dont see how karma being money could work with downvotes. It only seems
to work with up votes.

The idea being that you give karma to another person by taking it from your
own stash. Up votes would cost you money. But how do downvotes work? Do you
take another person's points away? That doesn't work because humans are
greedy.

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cookiecaper
evincarofautumn mentioned this from one angle, but I too think that high karma
levels on HN are already valuable. Just look at the false acclaim that gets
heaped on every time patio11 posts something. It's not that he never posts
anything worthwhile, but you can definitely see some wild responses that are
directly attributable to Patrick's place high on the HN total karma list (like
that thing on lionhearted's blog a couple of years ago, on how patio11 should
charge people A LOT of money because he's like the smartest guy ever).

I suspect that many offers for consultation come in to HN's top commenters and
many of the things they say get noticed above the sayings of the common pleb.
If you have a high amount of karma, I think it's definitely worth some money.

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billpatrianakos
Hopefully you're not suggesting that it actually be worth money. That's
ridiculous. If you mean what if it worked like money that might be interesting
but I doubt it would be helpful.

What problem would that solve? How would that even be realistic the way you
describe? This doesn't make any sense at all and here's why:

If karma is worth money then where does the initial money come from? Does PG
give everyone 1500 to start like it's Monopoly? Do you put up the money
yourself?

Assuming you put up your own money it just isn't fair. The richest of us get
more influence and the poor get none. It'll actually work a lot like the real
US economy.

Then, if karma is worth money then wouldnt it make sense to be able to
withdraw it and use it in places other than HN? So what if you get people
hoarding karma then they withdraw it all and end up with one. Imagine some of
the very well respected people here suddenly having no karma at all because
they withdrew it and spend it on a new computer.

It's just not realistic and it defeats the whole purpose of karma. If it's
only good on HN then it isn't worth money. The way it works now is probably
the fairest way possible. If karma is one measure of the quality of a user's
contributions and how much respect they have earned then making karma work
like money would totally undermine its value. Right now, karma is earned. In a
money scenario there are more chances to game the system and skew it both
positively and negatively for a user.

If you want to give someone money then check out their profile and see if you
can either donate to one of their projects through PayPal or Flattr or
something or you can just send an email and ask.

