The people in charge of where the site "goes" via moderator tools are the people who play the game to accumulate points to get mod powers.
What you reward, you get more of. Therefore the site will move in the direction of point collecting game players.
Doesn't particularly matter what they "should" do, what the site is designed to do, intentionally or otherwise, rightly or wrongly, is what the site will do.
Telling everyone including the people in charge not to do what they are designed to enjoy doing is basically abstinence based sex ed. "Here's something you haven't seen, it's a lot of fun, now don't do it" Good luck with that.
Lets say HN karma points were rewarded on the basis of using the F word in posts. I don't think advising people the moral high ground would be to abstain would clean the place up, if the whole purpose of the design is to encourage it. This might actually be a funny April fools joke to think about...
I agree with that. Whenever I use the site, the 'description' from "Whose Line is it Anyway?" plays in my head.[0] However, it's the same as any website where there is a "karma" system (like this one for instance ;) ). It feel good getting points, it feels bad losing points. It feels good knowing you have tons, and are in the "Top x% of answerers" or whatever.
Do I think that's necessarily the right way to get people to come to your site and answer programming questions? Maybe not (no, I don't really), but it certainly does keep people coming back to the site. That and the fact that it's probably the biggest answer repository on the net.
Oh, and here's an upvote for you to show no hard feelings. I believe your general statement is correct, I'm just not sure that's what the author is going for.
It doesn't matter how silly you think it is. You don't create a system that reinforces bad behavior and then say "oh, but you should magically turn off your human nature and do the opposite of the what the system teaches you to do". Systems need to be designed to reinforce good behavior, otherwise we get reddit and HN and wikipedia and SO.
