zlacker

>>vincen+(OP)
Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point.

This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me.

When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).

EDIT:

1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.

2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.

>>weinzi+V
Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.

>>lordna+k1
I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page.

Both modulo moderation, of course.