Comment by borski

3 hours ago

Flags also require a minimum karma, and members with yet higher karma can also undead posts, if needed.

HN is actually surprisingly good about this, so I disagree with your assertion.

What does “high karma” have to do with less emotionally driven voting behavior?

  • You acquire karma through posting things that are interesting or curious enough that others upvote them.

    Thus, you build reputation by acquiring karma.

    It isn’t perfect, but the fact that folks with higher karma can “fix” the emotional flags of folks with lower karma, it helps.

    Also, I’d recommend re-reading the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • Almost all of my karma is from a single post link that blew up randomly. I think this is the case for most users' karma here.

    • All that does is reinforce the existing biases. If you post a lot of things other HN users agree with, you get the ability to silence things HN users don't like.

    • You just explained the mechanism by which the karma number goes up, not explained your theory why you think higher number means less emotional voting.