There are no hard rules, but I see it as a sequence of filters.
First, like Brendan said, there are some mistakes that result in negative karma. If you can avoid this, feel free to post.
After you pass the first filter, there are various things that could bring positive karma. It can be research, or something personal, or fiction… You only need to succeed in one of those criteria. If you fail at all of them, karma will be close to zero.
Finally, moderators decide whether to move your post on front page, which I guess is a combination of topic and karma.
Sometimes the karma depends on what other people write, for example if we start having too much fiction, people will be annoyed even by things they would have normally liked or ignored.
There are no hard rules, but I see it as a sequence of filters.
First, like Brendan said, there are some mistakes that result in negative karma. If you can avoid this, feel free to post.
After you pass the first filter, there are various things that could bring positive karma. It can be research, or something personal, or fiction… You only need to succeed in one of those criteria. If you fail at all of them, karma will be close to zero.
Finally, moderators decide whether to move your post on front page, which I guess is a combination of topic and karma.
Sometimes the karma depends on what other people write, for example if we start having too much fiction, people will be annoyed even by things they would have normally liked or ignored.