On: Ask HN: How would you assess the value of HN karma?

[kf]

Creating a sock puppet and upvoting yourself is against the secret HN rules. Please don't do it.

Sock puppet karma points are worth negative karma.

[limmeau → kf]

Self-upvoting is at least bad style. I'm not advocating to do it, just trying to estimate the minimum price if one wants to get karma somehow.

As for negative karma, does HN actively detect sock puppets to punish them?

[kf → limmeau]

Creating an account to upvote yourself is against the rules and HN has sock-puppet detection software that is not fully published in the open source release of news.arc. Reddit similarly has sock puppet detection software... all social news sites beyond a certain size need software like this or things like the home page being taken over by internet marketers happens.