Ask HN: What's Your Vote Worth?

[DanielBMarkham]

What with one story about hackers trying to spoof the HN voting system through CSRF and another story today about some guy wanting to pay to get on the front page, I was wondering: what's your vote worth?

Everybody has a price. If I were to offer you a dollar to vote for my story -- let's say it's completely off-topic and anathema to HN -- would you upvote it for a dollar? Five dollars? Ten?

How about a hundred bucks? At what point does your interest in making HN a good site cease and your interest in making a buck begin?

I think my price is around a hundred bucks. Not sure though. It might depend on the topic. I'd have a hard time upvoting "Britney Spears goes panty-less in visit to Queen!"

This is an interesting question (to me) because it drives at the question "What's your reputation on a social site worth?"

[stonemetal]

I guess it depends on what you are talking about paying for. $100 for the front page seems cheap, $100 for my one up vote seems to high. So far as I can tell, me voting a story up or down in no way effects my reputation( I can't tell who voted an article up or down and I don't get points for it.) It is my comments that carry both my recorded reputation and my actual what my peers think about me reputation. However moving what appears on HN to a money basis would effect how I view the site or more likely stop viewing the site. The signal to noise ratio would change for the worse.