Hello HN. Not to boast, but I've devised a foolproof method to get more karma than you. Given that we're all members of the entrepreneurial community, I thought I'd share this method with my fellow colleagues, in hopes that they may derive some inspiration. So here it goes - my new Instant Karma Plan:<p>1. Subscribe to 37signals company blog via an RSS reader that gives up-to-the-minute updates.<p>2. Write a simple script that, upon each update, submits that 37signals post as an article on HN, so that I'm the first to post it.<p>3. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the karma.<p>Whatdya think?
Here's a better plan:<p>1. Find a new submission with no upvotes or comments that is interesting to you<p>2. Make an interesting comment for that submission<p>3. Upvote the submission - if it's new enough it should get bumped to the front page, and if it's interesting enough it should start getting upvoted, as well as your comment<p>4. GOTO 1
Yeah, I was going to write a bot do the same with xkcd, TechCrunch, and (especially) PG's essays.<p>The benefits are twofold: The community gets extremely quick exposure to content it seems to really appreciate, and no user gets huge karma just for being the first to submit PG's new essay.<p>Save the karma for people finding things you couldn't find yourself.<p>edit: Pretty uncool how people are dogging on your post just because you're new here. I just wanted to post that I agree, despite not being new here and not being particularly hurting for karma.
Okay, so this post may annoy some HN loyalists but it's also a reality that all communities need to deal with eventually. Keep in mind there is a high-probability that someone has already implemented this IKP.<p>Let's turn this lemon into a shandy and figure out what to do about it.
Is it so hard for people to accept that the reason 37s, Joel, pg, Atwood, Maroon, Raganwald, etc became popular is that a) they wrote a lot and b) people liked it? All of them (well, Maroon is more recent) have been doing this for 4+ years, with several hundred to over 1,000 posts. These heavy producers are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the good written content on the web. Sure, there are other sources of good (maybe even better) writing, (Moserware is a current favorite of mine) but they haven't been writing for long and don't write much so they get seen as often. How many things on the top 30 are more than 2 days old?<p>This is just like saying "I'm sick of hearing about all those startups in Silicon Valley - I only want to hear about startups from other places."
As a new user who hasn't yet contributed much to the community, don't you think your post is rude?<p><pre><code> user : bporterfield
created : 30 days ago
karma : 38
8 comments, 1.50 points per comment [searchyc.com]
</code></pre>
That said, you may want to use <a href="http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-ui.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/hn-blacklist-now-with-u...</a> to blacklist the sites you don't want to see.
I did that with xkcd a while back, and asked the community if I should take it down. The general consensus was yes, so I did.<p>Karma isn't really important, what's more important is improving the community and quality of submissions. It's better to have people manually submit every post from a particular feed, since eventually you'll hit a few posts that aren't really relevant, and those will be left out, helping the signal-vs-noise ratio (pun intended).
Forget karma. The real question is whether or not the articles submitted bring value to the community. I submitted two 37 Signals articles because I found them interesting, and on topic for the community.<p>I think it is instructive to consider if most of the negative commentary regarding the 37 Signals submissions would disappear if the source was different (eg, they came from author X instead).
Wow this joke has never been told on any karma-based message board ever. How witty. Did you think about telling it again on Slashdot about Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala? They'll get a kick out of it.
This might explain some of the recent test posts ( <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213701" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213701</a> ).
If a site is over-submitted, maybe further submissions from that site shouldn't accrue karma to the submitter. That is: "No cherry picking." Articles would still appear and their placement still depend on votes, but there'd be no narrow personal value to submitting them.<p>Initial candidates for such no-credit status: TC, PG, 37, CH, XKCD... though the list could be dynamic based on number or popularity of recent submissions.<p>(Crop rotation for mindharvests?)
Sounds good, make sure you keep your stats up though:<p><a href="http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield" rel="nofollow">http://searchyc.com/user/bporterfield</a>