

A little Hackernews hack - user24

tldr: change topcolor in your profile to black. Soon you'll have no idea what your karma score is, and you won't care. Your individuality improves.<p>Karma. It's pointless.<p>After a while, I find myself focusing too much on that little number. Happened on slashdot, digg, reddit, and now hackernews.<p>I find that I just can't help treating it something like a game, upping my karma score.<p>It's a mildly destructive pattern which tends to lead to shallower comments, echoing popular opinions winning out over genuine insight in my commenting habits. I'm sure it contributes to meme propagation on other sites (thankfully HN is still relatively free of memes).<p>The hack: in your profile page, change topcolor to black.<p>Then hackernews looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/eK796.png<p>This means I literally have no idea what my karma score is day-to-day. It's liberating. Try it.<p>If you need to see where the 'threads' link is or etc, just Ctrl-A or Cmd-A on mac, which highlights all text and you can then see where the links are. I find that for 'new' 'newest' and 'threads' I've learned where they are.<p>Yeah. Just a small thing. If you find yourself caring too much about karma, try it.
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rednum
Sounds good. However I don't have enough karma to change it..

Maybe hide karma option would be better? At the moment, my screen is quite
bright [1], and I can easily see the score of your screenshot.

[1] Usually, I have brighntess set significantly lower than almost of all my
friends, but for some reasons I've increased it - so I think on average
person's screen the score would be visible too.

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user24
You're right, I hadn't noticed that the text was a different colour. If you
change it to 222222 that completely masks the karma score.

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user24
I've been doing this for at least 3 months now and haven't looked back or
found any negative side-effect.

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nomad2986
I really like this idea so I was going to give you an up vote, but I guess you
don't care? Haha

