zlacker

Imagine you visit a website, where both links and non-links are shown by underlined black text. You quickly get confused by what you can and can't click on until you rollover them. I think we can both agree this is a bad thing, and that the correct fix for this is to make the links a different colour so it's obvious.

Imagine you're a new user visiting Stack Overflow, when things you both can and cannot use are shown in exactly the same way as a full user until you click on it and then it tells you that you need X karma to do something. I think this is a bad thing and that the correct fix is to either hide the things you can't do (because features I can't use don't really matter to me) or to make those things look different. This is where we differ, because you think it's not a bug, it's a feature, because it's a "small barrier" by confusing new users as to what they can do out of the box. I personally think that's /insane/, much like someone who decides to make all their links black as a "small barrier to new users".

I think you also misunderstood what I meant by "reduce the arbitrary karma limits". I don't necessarily mean "make them easier to attain" (although I'd argue reducing barriers to entry unless you have a good reason as it generally encourages new users), but rather "reduce how many of them there are". There are 10 different 'levels' of karma where features are unlocked to /users/. Why does a user need 15 to upvote but 100 to downvote? Why do you need 500 karma to retag questions but 750 to edit community Wiki posts? Most sites have a maximum of 3 levels of hierarchy (Admin, Moderator and User), your site has /at least/ 11. I guess with the badges system I should be happy that it doesn't use the same ridiculous system as Team Fortress 2.

And no, I wouldn't regard HN as good at usability either. Functional rather than ideal, even if it is trying to make creating a new poll difficult.