I guess my point is that Hacker News is being gamed the way reddit and digg are.
What a sad thought. "Gaming" hacker news to get invited to Startup School.
Here's an idea:
Why not just be yourself. Contribute what you can. Take what you need. Make a few friends along the way. And learn a thing or two that may change your life. I can't think of a better place to do it.
Karma is a very minor byproduct. What you and this community become is the real payoff. But like a planted seed, you may just have to wait a while before you see that result.
I think I read that sentence as being the opposite as you did, i.e. He didn't game HN because he wanted to get invited again, even though he almost did.
Correct. While I was working actively on my software, my brain focused on the best ways to do X or Y in the fastest time using a software application. In other words, writing something to make me more productive or more time efficient, even if it wasn't something that would be sellable. If it saved me time, then I could therefore use that time to code something I could sell. So I let my brain wander around the karma concept and that's what I came up with (a long time ago). But no, I decided not to do it.
One corollary to that is by not having done it, all I can do is write a post on news.yc. But that does not mean that it should be confused with the act of actually doing it.
Another corollary is that maybe doing it wouldn't have been a bad idea. If karma is the measure of value, and users enjoy the stories, maybe developing an algorithm that automatically submits stories to news.yc (and judges how users vote on it to then submit better stories, the way a human might) would actually be something Paul loves, and the first release of such an app, of course, could basically submit everything indiscriminately to start with.
The trouble is a lot of good stuff slips through the new page unnoticed unless you post at the right time or get a friend to bump it. I find just as many tasty links from new as I do the homepage. Perhaps the homepage could shuffle in a few random new unvoted posts too?
Isn't it pretty neat, though, that Paul Graham doesn't have to write an rss scraper to get content, he can just incentivize users with karma and the crowd will do it for him?
If I recall correctly, when I went in 2005, the application requested my reddit username. I had hardly any karma, but a few people, including Steve and Alexis knew me from my comments.
What a sad thought. "Gaming" hacker news to get invited to Startup School.
Here's an idea:
Why not just be yourself. Contribute what you can. Take what you need. Make a few friends along the way. And learn a thing or two that may change your life. I can't think of a better place to do it.
Karma is a very minor byproduct. What you and this community become is the real payoff. But like a planted seed, you may just have to wait a while before you see that result.