
Ask HN: What are the HN karmic privileges/penalties? - JDGM
Quoth "jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ":<p>"You can only downvote comments once you have sufficient karma. The required level rises over time to account for the karma inflation caused by an increasing userbase."<p>"high average score on your comments will give your comments preference in the search order (this is part of the ‘secret sauce’)."<p>"If there are no real big benefits to having a good or even excellent karma you might want to conclude that it doesn’t matter at all, but that is definitely not the case, since <i>having ‘bad’ karma (&#60; 0) will negatively impact your ability to interact with the site.</i>"<p>The italics in the last one are mine since I'm not entirely sure what that means.<p>I have also heard that at some karma level HNers get to change the colour of their topbar. How jolly!<p>Do we have a comprehensive list? If the levels are subject to inflation then perhaps a correspondingly definitive "price guide" can't accompany it, but any information would be interesting, out of date or not.
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GHFigs
At 400 you get to downvote.

At 401 you get to apologize for accidentally downvoting someone.

At 419 you get lucrative business opportunities.

At 420 you get baked.

At 451 you get [deleted].

At 777 you get lucky.

At 1337 "they" teach you the Secret Handshake Deal Protocol.

At 1999 you have to update a million lines of COBOL in order to advance.

At 2010 you get to complain that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

At 2600 you get to make free long distance calls.

At 3003 you get your TI-83 taken away and returned to you at the end of class.

At 4352 you get to get to post a jokey self-referential comment without
anybody complaining that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.

~~~
StavrosK
This is inaccurate, and just the sort of post you would expect nowadays on HN.
It's turning into reddit.

~~~
TillE
While I strongly object to jokes and mindless comments on serious topics,
there's really not a lot to say or any interesting discussion to be had on
this particular subject.

Lightly mocking that doesn't really detract from anything, not on this post.

~~~
StavrosK
That was my thinking as well, this post is light enough that we can all unwind
and joke around.

~~~
JDGM
Completely agreed. Tenuously on topic, if Hacker News had - _shudder_ \-
badges, then today I would have earned something like "Lightweight: posted
something of sufficient triviality to attract a joker".

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jrajav
As for "negatively impacting your ability to interact with the site", that
refers to the practice of slowbanning and hellbanning. Slowbanning is what it
sounds like - the site will be slower for you, sometimes just a little and
sometimes a lot. The idea there is to subconsciously encourage you to visit
the site less and to contribute less when you do. Hellbanning is more extreme.
When you're hellbanned, nothing you contribute will be visible to anyone else,
but it won't look like anything's wrong to you. (However, people with enough
karma can elect to see your contributions regardless. This is why you'll
sometimes see people kindly pointing out someone's hellbanned state.)

~~~
gingerlime
That's really interesting to know. I'm very curious about the technical
aspects of slowbanning - how is this accomplished without "wasting" valuable
server resources?

I've asked a somehow related question[1] on stackoverflow but got no
replies... maybe this can help solve the mystery?

[1][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131671/throttling-
http-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15131671/throttling-http-api-
calls-with-delay)

~~~
brudgers
My inference (from hellbanning and rumors of a unique YC alumni topbar) is
that there is a closure over each username. If that is the case, then http
requests can be assigned various priorities within the queue...or the closure
could include something equivalent to:

    
    
      (let ((sleep 1000)...
    

Closures would certainly be a lispy way of doing things.

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AndrewDucker
I'm not sure what level you have to be at to get the ability to Flag stories.
I do know that using it too much will get it turned off for you (as that
happened to me). I had been assuming that Flagging stories was the right thing
to do (as they don't have downvotes, and we're told not to comment negatively
on them), but apparently you can have too much of a good thing!

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zerr
Can anyone(PG?) comment what's the point of non-disclosing e.g. how that
search ordering is calculated?

Or any other aspect of this site (if there are any other)...

So far, it looks to me like the secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

~~~
mschuster91
Maybe it is hidden deep in the source code
(<https://github.com/wting/hackernews>), the problem is that Arc is basically
unreadable if you're used to stuff like C/C++/Java/PHP/Assembler.

~~~
JDGM
Is that the latest source? I didn't realise it was available but when
searching HN before posting the topic I did find
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853964> ("Tell HN: How to find karma
thresholds in the HN source code") so perhaps if things haven't changed much
in the intervening 1298 days it'll still work.

~~~
jrajav
It might be the meat of it, but IIRC pg has said that he tweaks key algorithms
like comment ranking on his own.

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pooriaazimi
Another factor in ranking of comments (apart from "average karma" of the
poster, and of course the points it's received) is simply its length! The
longer, the more it counts. I think it's there to promote deep and lengthy
discourse, not one-line, "Stupid article. I stopped reading at [x]" kind of
comment.

Source: experience.

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jtheory
I didn't realize changing the color of the top bar was a karma-sensitive bonus
-- when I first heard about it, I checked and it was already in my profile.
So: it's not for super-high karma users only!

I got comment downvoting at 500 karma, I think; and my karma is still < 1K,
but note that the downvote limit may _now_ be 1K (I'm assuming they don't
revoke the ability from users in the gap every time they bump the level).

AFAIK there's nothing special waiting for me at 1K (or any other level),
though I admit I'd be slightly encouraged to participate more if there were.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
If your karma is high enough, you can downvote stories.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Must be a pretty high up privilege then.

~~~
StavrosK
Not that high up; I'm able to downvote stories.

The ability to spread misinformation requires > 10K, though, I think.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Haha, nice one!

@elliott:
[http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvoteart...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ#downvotearticle)

~~~
elliottcarlson
That's what I figured, thanks ;)

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mikecane
I don't understand this obsession with how this site works. You shouldn't be
worrying about karma or why things are made [dead]. Just contribute the most
interesting stuff and things will take care of themselves naturally.

~~~
klez
> I don't understand this obsession with how this site works

Isn't this _hacker_ news? If we don't obsess about how things work, who will?

~~~
mikecane
Hahaha. OK, point taken!

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jahewson
Downvotes currently require > 500 karma. Topbar color change is maybe 250.. I
don't remember exactly.

~~~
Achshar
How can the top bar color change be of any use?

~~~
JDGM
I just set mine to 212121 and, rather topically, now I can't make out from the
top right corner how much karma I have. I suppose that could be used to remind
a person that they've got work to do instead of checking if anyone has upvoted
their stuff.

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UnoriginalGuy
Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day.

A few months ago downvoting seems to have appeared at around 1000~ for me.

~~~
JDGM
"Nobody could make a list since as you yourself said it changes day by day."

Not quite. I'm asking what the privileges/penalties _are_ , which I believe
_can_ be listed. An additional second column for the accompanying thresholds,
sure, they change so maybe not.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
No way the admins will release that. It would be a goldmine for spammers. Just
get their account up to X karma and it is worth twice as much for resale.

~~~
jtheory
You're overstating this, I think.

How much would a downvoting HN account be worth, really?

Sure, a spammer could sneak in a few messages at a more visible level, or
presumably down-vote their competitors, but the suddenly-abusive account would
get shut down pretty swiftly.

On other hand, the work required to get an account up to a significant level
(say, 500+) is non-trivial, cannot be outsourced to a minimally-trained mouse-
clicker, and wouldn't run cheap.

It's not clear to me how it would help a spammer to know what the limit it,
given that it's high enough that the work is not worthwhile.

