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I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. If you give people a numerical rating most will feel compelled to improve their standing. Losing karma is negat
by philk 16y ago
I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. If you give people a numerical rating most will feel compelled to improve their standing. Losing karma is negative feedback (hence punishment).
It doesn't matter that your HN karma score isn't going to get you laid[1], people generally care about anything they're scored on.
[1] If it did edw519 would probably be dead from exhaustion or at least severely chafed.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoJust so long as you understand that it doesn't work this way for everyone. I hate the notion of karma used by sites like HN and Reddit. It turns the content of the site into a popularity contest, specifically because the motivation you're talking about encourages people to do things that have crowd appeal. Conversely, when an active, respected community member -- like jrockway for example -- says something offbeat, controversial, or just different from the prevailing opinion of the audience, and then gets "punished" for it by this collective reduction of a totally worthless number ... to me, all that does is reflect badly on the community. To be honest, I have a pretty low opinion of a lot of the HN community, and the karma system contributes to that.
- jules 16y agoI agree. There is much less interesting discussion here than on sites without karma. The groupthink on HN is even worse than on reddit.
- swombat 16y agoI'm not sure how you can make this statement with a straight face. Name another site with tens of thousands of active users having this level of discussion without karma. (the fact that you're not being downvoted for making such an egregiously incorrect statement is proof if it was needed that the groupthink is not so bad, btw)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jules 16y agoTens of thousands of users I don't know, but Lambda the Ultimate for example. Discussion on blog posts also generally has less groupthink. Voting was intended as upvote means good comment and downvote means bad comment, but people use it as upvote means "I agree" and downvote means "I disagree". Not everyone of course, but a lot of people do. This problem is less severe on hacker news than on reddit, but on reddit more people keep posting regardless of downvotes whereas here they are banned from the site.
- philwelch 16y agoLtU has a decent community because it covers relatively esoteric stuff, and excludes a general audience by design. HN, on its worst days, is a glorified comments section for tech industry blogs.