Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points? - linux_devil
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tokenadult
As a heuristic, if you have to ask whether or not it is legit, the answer is
probably no.

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lutusp
I think you may want to define "legitimate" in this context. Obviously your
karma isn't that of another person, and particularly not someone who wants to
buy an HN account.

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opminion
Try to reason from first principles: karma is a property of a HN username. A
username is attached to a human identity, even if not enforced.

Karma is used to predict future quality of that human's posts based on
previous posts, and for it to make any sense it must be assumed that past
quality is a predictor of future quality.

Changing the human behind the karma breaks those assumptions, so it is a way
of misleading the site's users.

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ScottWhigham
The only "legit" reason I can think of that would make someone say, "I'll pay
you for that user account" is that they are a spammer who wants to be able to
submit links that get around the various automatic account controls in place
(that prohibit accounts below a certain karma threshold from creating posts or
commenting too frequently).

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bbissoon
On HN, karma is a commodity. You've put the time and effort into growing your
karma legitimately and if you don't have a problem - why would anyone else.

Think about it, how do we know this isn't the person who bough it having
doubts about the purchase?

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mooreds
Seems like bad karma to me.

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krapp
Why would someone want to buy it?

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mkr-hn
Some people care about accumulations represented by numbers. I don't
understand it either.

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krapp
I would even imagine most really high-karma accounts have probably already
been linked to a known real-world identity. There isn't a pm system or any
private content in user accounts so even nefariously selling access to someone
else's account isn't likely to be of value to anyone.

Although I guess that depends on what you would consider 'high' karma. If it's
just anything above the threshold for downvoting then maybe having a force
multiplier for that might be worth something to somebody. Still though, I
wouldn't pay _money_ for it.

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niico
I bet if you dig in Silk Road you can find someone selling it.

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dotcoma
What about robbing a bank?

