[pavlov]

37k karma. I keep posting because at 50k points you get to hang out with Tom Cruise at the Y Combinator Celebrity Center.

What’s that? Wrong cult? Now you tell me…

I don’t submit much, so the karma is from comments. Most of the time I manage to refrain from poor jokes like the one above because they do result in downvotes. In that sense karma seems to be serving its purpose as a soft content regulation mechanism.

I mostly type comments on the phone in idle moments — the typical usage scenario for an online social network. The iOS Screen Time feature suggests that I’ve spent an average of 40 min / day on this site for the past week, which sounds right.

Social networks tend to be addictive, but at least HN is benign because it doesn’t have an endless feed nor algorithmically boosted emotionally provocative viral content. I’ve certainly got much more pleasure and utility out of HN than I ever did with Twitter, for example.