I’ve never seen people on the likes of blackhatworld selling hacker news accounts or services. The glass half full take on this is that hn is surprisingly robust in its ability to deal with vote manipulation.
replyIf you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
replyI think there's a short-term rate limit applied to everyone, e.g. you get a message if you try to post three replies in the same minute. I've seen it once, and I don't think I'm active enough to have earned a manual flag.
replyThe karma points you get on HN are worthless, which I think is a bonus. They don't buy you anything. On Reddit, for instance, many parts of the site are walled off until you have "farmed" enough karma to participate.
replyNot exactly true.
replyYou get the right to down vote and if I promote my totally not a scam product on HN, people will check my user account and see: on wow over 9000 karma? Gotta be trust worthy, when in truth it's just been karma farming.
HN does limit some of it, but it's not a panacea.
I don't know, never found much value in karma. I recreate an account at least once a year for no particular reason and it roughly takes me a week to get enough karma to do what is important (flagging posts).
replyMy account is literally 4 years old and I'm not even halfway there.
replyHow do you do it?
And I'm trying to limit myself from saying unwanted things like criticizing ** or saying something nice about **. (Self censoring to avoid downvotes).
Maybe I should be more active.