Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308175

by linux_devil • 13 years ago

5 11 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

lutusp• 13 years ago

I think you may want to define "legitimate" in this context. Obviously your karma isn't that of another person, and particularly not someone who wants to buy an HN account.

dotcoma• 13 years ago

What about robbing a bank?

mooreds• 13 years ago

Seems like bad karma to me.

krapp2• 13 years ago

Why would someone want to buy it?

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

Some people care about accumulations represented by numbers. I don't understand it either.

krapp2• 13 years ago

I would even imagine most really high-karma accounts have probably already been linked to a known real-world identity. There isn't a pm system or any private content in user accounts so even nefariously selling access to someone else's account isn't likely to be of value to anyone.

Although I guess that depends on what you would consider 'high' karma. If it's just anything above the threshold for downvoting then maybe having a force multiplier for that might be worth something to somebody. Still though, I wouldn't pay money for it.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

As a heuristic, if you have to ask whether or not it is legit, the answer is probably no.

niico• 13 years ago

I bet if you dig in Silk Road you can find someone selling it.

opminion• 13 years ago

Try to reason from first principles: karma is a property of a HN username. A username is attached to a human identity, even if not enforced.

Karma is used to predict future quality of that human's posts based on previous posts, and for it to make any sense it must be assumed that past quality is a predictor of future quality.

Changing the human behind the karma breaks those assumptions, so it is a way of misleading the site's users.

ScottWhigham• 13 years ago

The only "legit" reason I can think of that would make someone say, "I'll pay you for that user account" is that they are a spammer who wants to be able to submit links that get around the various automatic account controls in place (that prohibit accounts below a certain karma threshold from creating posts or commenting too frequently).

bbissoon• 13 years ago

On HN, karma is a commodity. You've put the time and effort into growing your karma legitimately and if you don't have a problem - why would anyone else.

Think about it, how do we know this isn't the person who bough it having doubts about the purchase?

Ask HN: Is it legit to sell HN account with high karma points?

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