Ask HN: Can we do a karma reset?

Posted by HNKarmaReset 8 hours ago

Counter5Comment10OpenOriginal

The high karma accounts are not always smart people, usually they’re incredibly immature and clearly lacking in experience.

Often, an account like this will post a comment demonstrating they have no clue what they’re talking about, and when someone even lightly corrects them what happens? They immediately abuse their power with heavy downvotes and sock puppets they can easily promote with their heavily weighted votes.

This is a shit-for-brains cliquey strategy that makes the site worse than it could otherwise be.

What would it take to do a 1-time karma reset (or has it already happened)?

It could be a way to save the site, otherwise I fear people will eventually jump ship.

The site format is fine, UI/UX, etc. but a few bad apples here spoil the whole bunch and they are multiboxing accounts like crazy to shape the narrative in highly personal, egoic, selfish ways that hurt the site and content just to comfort their ego by giving them undeserved authority.

Comments

Comment by uberman 8 hours ago

Do you have proof for you claims? I am under the impression that 500 rep essentially maxes out your standard privileges and that no reputation based weighting is applied to votes.

If your fear is that there are voting rings (which apparently the system tries to detect) then resetting the rep will give them more relative power not less.

Personally I dont pay any attention to the rep of a user when evaluating how I should or should not engage with them. I think things are working just fine at the moment.

If you are frustrated by repetitive homepage content, I recommend you switch to the "new" view as there is lots of diversity there.

Again, if you have any proof that a cadre of nefarious high profile users are somehow abusing the system I would love to see it.

Comment by neverclever 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by uberman 7 hours ago

So then no proof whatsoever? So for fun I looked at your user and color me shocked that you are complaining about the use of sock puppets while apparently using one yourself. Alternatively has 8 days allowed you to devine the inner workings of this site?

Comment by uberman 7 hours ago

He gave no links nor did the original post. I did no flagging and did not vote on any item in this thread. Yet I see that four accounts with a combined age of 10 days wants to complain about sock puppets.

Comment by neverclever 7 hours ago

Why would anyone else care? It was you

Edited to add them in the original even though it should be common knowledge that obviously high karma posting is treated differently than low

Comment by Sabinus 1 hour ago

Neither link you posted showed anything to me other than you need a negligible of karma to unlock comment downvoting.

Do you want to quote the sections you feel detail how "high karma posting" is treated?

Comment by HowDumbRU 7 hours ago

Anyone can log into a decent rep acct to see the dead comment lol

It’s proof already the site is broken.

You said provide proof for your claims, he links official HN links and it is auto dead (or you did it).

That is a broken site right there

Comment by DidntUseIt 7 hours ago

He gave you 2 links and you flagged it, proving his point even more.

Google it bro, links right to a post where it is confirmed that it does and even mentions “contrary to popular belief”

Comment by neverclever 7 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by HNcantBeSaved 7 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by fxd 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by nacozarina 7 hours ago

I agree with your observations, but my conclusion from it is therefore karma isn’t worth worrying about. Not uncommon for me to see heavily upvoted material I disagree with, or vice-versa, and am resigned to the fact that bot traffic will be a significant factor on both counts. I still get to view both. Unlike reddit, it seems unpopular opinions still have a home at HN. Karma is mostly for the bots, not me.

Comment by rvz 8 hours ago

Unfortunately there's not much you can do here and it is not going to happen despite HN being in fact far worse today than it was a decade ago.

The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled and now we have slop filled posts in Show HN and some instances of crypto memecoin scams.

Things would have to get significantly far worse (spam, AI agents, constant rule breaking) for a reset with new rules. It may happen, but we are not there yet.

Comment by srean 6 hours ago

> The site is unfortunately filled with rampant upvote rings, AI agents / bots commenting, users that have certain privileges who can rapidly comment and reply without getting throttled

Can you tell us about how do you know this