Comment by mbreese
12 years ago
Well, hopefully new users can hit the 1000+ mark quick enough to not have it affect them too much.
But, I wonder how the lack of visible scores on comments has affected the overall comment scoring rate. For the average new user today, how long do they have to wait to get to 1000 karma? How long was it a few years ago? These would be interesting questions to answer.
I joined more than 2000 days ago. I don't have 1000 karma. This way I'll maybe never will reach it. Seems a bit of a high threshold to me. But maybe my commentary just isn't good enough.
Karma per post is not well correlated with the actual quality of your contributions. You can get hundreds of karma for posting superficial observations early on a post that become popular. Someone that has observed HN for long enough could probably get 1000 karma in a day from just trying to optimize for karma instead of quality.
If you really do want to reach some karma threshold I would suggest trying to get it from submissions instead. You can easily get hundreds of karma per submission if you submit the newest release of some popular software product or the latest Zed Shaw rant with very little invested. This also has the bonus that you are not actually lowering the quality of your commenting for more karma.
That, and doing some basic research to post additional useful information (facts, numbers, stats, references, background info, etc) on a relatively new thread.
I'm mentioning this because I believe such posts are genuinely useful and surely deserve the points they get.
BTW I don't think I ever got near a hundred points for a comment. But I suppose it can happen in the above circumstance in a popular thread.
Maybe the easier solution would be to have two thresholds - one for un-endorsed posting and one for endorsing. Or having a heuristic that includes ave. comment score as a factor. Or... Or...
Honestly, the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems, which is usually not a good sign.
I'm not sure it is a worthwhile endeavor to hope that new users hit 1000 karma. I think the discourse would be better served by having a wide variety of people saying something worthwhile occasionally rather than trying to say something popular more often to play a karma game.
The best idea I've heard so far is a timeout, such that even if no one endorses your comment is to let you comment again anyway after a day.
I'm still not sure what the benefit of adding endorsements is compared to using a generic upvote as the endorsement.