I'd extend this to posting any stories at all -- if posting a story cost a few points of karma, it would discourage the 'submit dozens of links and hope that one or two of them get voted up' approach which seems to be becoming increasingly common lately.
I don't think lack of articles submitted is a problem. What's wrong with lurking and posting a few comments here and there to gain the karma needed for posting?
Another idea is that posting one article a day could be free, but ti costs karma for each additional one posted (maybe even an increasing cost based on how many you post per day.)
My feeling is that anyone who doesn't think they have anything worth saying probably doesn't have anything worth linking to either.
Requiring that users acquire at lease one point of karma from posting comments before they can submit stories would also eliminate the random floods of spam submissions, since spammers aren't likely to either (a) post comments, or (b) have the comments they post get voted up.
Yes. IMO having people participate in a discussion before starting one is important. It forces the poster to get a general sense of the site and its (un)spoken rules before starting a discussion.
This is one of the foundations of building an actual sense of community. If you were having a discussiion in the real world, wouldn't you feel a bit put-off if someone jumped in and started talking without spending even a moment to hear what other people are saying?
Requiring that someone has SOME positive karma before posting is just a way of saying "yes, this person has shown some interest in participating in a reasonable manner".
No, ideally people just wouldn't submit or vote up crappy submissions.
I think the problem is that it's easy to vote up quick amusing little things, but longer submissions that take effort to read, understand and evaluate have a bias against them, so crap tends to float on top.
I don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with polls, except when they push other submissions off the new page before enough people get a chance to vote on them. Maybe polls should cost karma only if the main thread doesn't get above a certain number of votes.
For me a poll may be a replacement for some of the Ask YC threads.
I like the way it is now but for those who are worried about karma ¿? maybe the best solution is not getting karma for submitting a Poll, of course that would need a better place to search for polls, should YC add a poll link to the navigation menu?
I think this might be a good idea but I'd say that it's too early to implement something like this. Let's wait and see if the poll submissions subside or if we realize that we're being overly conservative.
Then there is the danger of people creating pseudo-polls using the old "vote up if..." trick. Not sure how YC deals with those -- maybe the editors nip them in the bud?
The comments so far are a mix of negative and positive about making this change now, but the voting is 20-3 in favor of the change.
I guess this is another case of the general issue that the people who write comments have different characteristics than those who hit the vote arrows.
How about an instant kill option with polls? People can send your karma to zero if they don't like it. That should solve the problem, of polls existing that is.
Or even better, an instant ban! And then it could instantly post the poll "Is X a douchebag?" with only one option. Once poll closes it would email the results to the author, and vote couple thousand times itself, if there aren't, or are, enough votes.
After that a bot could send the results to all the news aggregators and vote it to the top on all of them, besides seeding the storm and nugache emails.
Finally, it would send the author's IP to Anonymous.
That should effectively dissuade someone from posting lame polls. If not, anyone elso got any ideas?
