The HN karma paradox
mixmax: There are many  interesting subtleties to voting and karma systems, such as the one we use here on HN. Another one is that a post that has a child that glorifies the parent "Great insight, bla.bla." will inevitably be voted up. You can probably find more if you look a bit.You assume humans are rational beings and vote accordingly. But they aren't, they are emotional beasts that are hard to control, and are full of strange biases and ideas about what is right and wrong.See for instance this list of cognitive biases from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Your paradox is explained by one of the biases listed, I'll leave it to you to figure out which one ;-)It's all about psychology.