Comment by latexr

> and there is practically no downsides if you upset anyone

Seems like the downsides are about the same as in other forums. It depends on if your account is anonymous or not.

> You get points for every answer that someone does to your comment, and the downvotes you get on your own comments don't offset the gained points.

I don’t think that’s right. You don’t get points for replies, you get points for upvotes. And downvotes you get also affect your overall karma, though you don’t seemingly have an upper bound on upvotes but I have read there is a lower bound of -4. An upvote on a submission seems to also be worth less than an upvote on a comment, though I’m not sure of the ratio (half? one third?).

> These points have real utility to make money indirectly: the more points you have, the more credibility you have on this platform and capacity to push a story.

I don’t think that’s right either. Once you can downvote and flag (500 karma?), more points don’t give you anything extra. Personally I rarely check someone’s points, only when viewing comment history or trying to identify spammers and other obvious bad actors.

> This is why I am collecting points on all my fake accounts, because once I have collected enough karma points, I can upvote my startup speech on Hackernews using these shadow accounts.

HN has voting ring detection. Though I can’t speak for how effective it is.