

My New Instant Karma Plan - bporterfield

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:<p>1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.<p>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.<p>3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.<p>Whatdya think?
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tsetse-fly
Please don't upvote stupid posts like this.

~~~
bporterfield
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!

~~~
Xichekolas
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.

~~~
ph0rque
This should trip pg's statistical abnormality observer, I would think...

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alex_c
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

~~~
technoguyrob
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

~~~
edw519
+1 Does that make me a "raptor"?

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aston
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.

~~~
edw519
"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.

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delano
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.

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

~~~
raganwald
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.

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ghiotion
> Whatdya think?

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

~~~
socratees
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.

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jrockway
_Whatdya think?_

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

~~~
mtts
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.

~~~
kaens
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.

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pchristensen
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."

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

Sarcasm duly noted.

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

~~~
TrevorJ
Sounds good.

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kirubakaran
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...](http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-
now-with-ui.html) to blacklist the sites you don't want to see.

~~~
josefresco
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.

~~~
kirubakaran
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.

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

~~~
rw
Your bank account is just a float in a database.

~~~
davo11
I hope it's not, too many rounding errors

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bkrausz
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).

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comatose_kid
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).

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tptacek
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.

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

~~~
jsjenkins168
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.

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

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gojomo
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?)

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rms
Instant Karma's gonna get you...

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adrianwaj
There are better ideas out there.

~~~
adrianwaj
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?

~~~
kyro
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.

~~~
adrianwaj
"Your original comment was of no value."

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

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

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sutro
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

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omouse
One acronym for you: GTFO

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

~~~
noodle
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.

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

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

<http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield>

