

Ask HN:  Why not make people pay using karma points for each submission to HN? - amichail

Moreover, when you sign up, you would have no karma points and would not be able to submit anything to HN until you accumulate enough via comments.<p>You can take this further by providing different prices for various initial point scores of a submission say from one to five with five being five times more expensive than one.
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makecheck
I wonder if this wouldn't work better for voting:

Subtract 1 karma from yourself each time up-vote or down-vote is used; this
effectively turns karma into "money" that can be spent on maintaining good
discussion and high quality submissions.

This would make people think twice before down-voting. It would also reduce
"knee-jerk" up-votes, as people would be more likely to reserve up-votes for
things that truly deserve it.

It would also mean that long-time users will naturally do more of the
moderation, as they have lots of points and may not be as afraid to use them.

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eru
Use a fractional system. Half a point spent for each point you are able to
vote. Otherwise you will have deflation.

(And a little inflation should not hurt too much. We have a lot of inflation
on HN right now.)

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bdfh42
Seems like an unwelcoming system for new users when (I assume) what you want
to tackle is the very small number of spam posts.

A bad side effect could be that HN users might be reluctant to post
interesting items that were only likely to appeal to a minority of their
fellows. Technical items on web development rarely get more than three or four
up-votes and yet many are likely to be of interest to web based start-ups -
part of the core HN target group.

Does not feel like a net win to me.

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PJGNasty
Microincentives are great in theory. I agree. I haven't seen them successfully
implemented in this context (though you could compare to an ebay seller
rating).

You would think someone would have figured out an effective method of user-
generated content quality control.

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tokenadult
This is a good thread to put up as a comment in the Feature Requests thread.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363>

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DanielBMarkham
Aside from wondering where you get all of these ideas, why not make it more
exciting than that? Make users _bet_ karma points on the likelihood that other
HN'ers will upvote what they submit.

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lacker
Well, since you already get karma points for upvotes, if you charged karma for
the submission it would essentially be the same as a bet.

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BearOfNH
This would certainly cut down on the number of poll responses, and those pesky
"Vote up if you like chocolate" comments.

