Honestly though, it’s just an artificial karma button, he could give himself 1000 points for every post he does if he wants to, and it’s not like it affects anything (unless it is submitting a request to some other site?). As we both know, the people who comment on blogs and click links and stuff are close to 1:100 readers. So having a quick “hover over this if you liked my post” seems logical to help get a feel for what your readers are liking even if they don’t want to comment or click any buttons.

…. plus it’s a cool unique effect :)

@ Chris Wellons:

I’ve been using Google Bookmarks ever since I sort of fell out of love with Delicioous. I used to used Google Notepad a lot but they discontinued it. I tried Evernote – even imported my GNotepad into it, but somehow it never was the same. So I hardly ever use it…

@ IceBrain:

My current HN karma is 3 so I’m not really addicted to that yet. I have more on reddit and suddenly I care about it. :P

@ Travis McCrea:

Hey, tuebl is nice! You are doing all kinds of cool things I see. :)

Oh, and that blog you mentioned – it’s Dan Curtis. A lot of his stuff is absolutely brilliant, though he is been getting a lot of flack on HN lately for precisely that button. :P It’s a neat idea but a lot of people think that by not explaining that it submits on hover rather than on click it weasels out kudos from people who are merely being curious.

He also got shit for making a lengthy blog post about opening up his custom made blogging platform, and in the final paragraph instead of link to Github there is a blurb about how it’s an invitation only exclusive thing that he is doing for select people he likes.

Something else to boost your ego http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/terminally-incoherent.com

To give you an idea a baseline site travismccrea.com is 5,000,000+ ranking I get my fair share of viewers.

TUEBL.com my 20K unique hits a day site is actually a lower rank than yours too. Though TUEBL requires less work so I am fine :P

http://tuebl.com recieves around 20K unique visitors a day… lol considering my most popular site before that recieved 500 a day and before that 2 a day… I am very pleased. I love keeping analytics on my sites and make sure to check them often. I blog for http://falkvinge.net as well and when I check his stats I am blown away by how many people are reading my posts… that blog is always making the front page of a subreddit or even sometimes reddit itself.

The other day a post I did got to #2 on /r/technology I was very pleased with myself.

So I know the feeling about the e-ego being stroked by people reading what you have to say.

Also I was on a blog recently that did a karma system to get real feedback of who was actively reading his posts:
There was a circular button next to the post, if you hovered over it for 2 seconds it would give the post a point. No upvote downvote or anything like that just straight forward: hover over it to let me know you read my post and liked it.

They got me too – I’m ashamed to admit that I glance at my HN karma rather frequently. Although it’s not so much about the number, but the social validation (?) of having people agreeing with my posts.

Every comment I get on a post is direct positive feedback – virtual karma if you will.

I don’t blog, but from my side as a reader, I often feel bad about not giving bloggers (including you) some feedback when I like the post. The problem is that I don’t always have something even vaguely interesting to add, and I strongly dislike those empty “great post!!1” comments.

I guess that’s why upvotes/likes/+1 are so successful. Feedback with low effort and little noise.

So many things to respond to.

It’s one of those things you save using Instantpaper, ReadItLater

I want to check those out later, but I don’t know how to remember to do that …

Just kidding, I use Diigo for that at the moment, but I’m always looking for something better. Instapaper looks promising.

Virtual fucking bannana stickers

So that’s where the comments banana icon thing comes from!

Hell, even this blog can be considered a token addiction. Every comment I get on a post is direct positive feedback – virtual karma if you will.

I feel dirty leaving a comment now.

Similarly I may pretend like I don’t care about the number of followers I have on Twitter but I secretly do.

It’s like that for me, too, but on GitHub. The number of people following me on GitHub has been growing lately, which has me unreasonably excited. Though, there is a practical side to it: I’ve had a couple of companies contact me, interested in recruiting me, because of my minor GitHub success.

@ astine:

Heh, very true. To tell you the truth, I wrote this post before my server got knocked out by HN so I actually did not expect it to be as popular as it was. :)

If I wanted to be e-famous I definitely wouldn’t be blogging about Vim, Git or obscure Polish science fiction novels.

That depends on amongst whom you want to be famous. I noticed that that Vim article got you HNed.

Speaking of which, karma systems on forums is another example of this.