I know it's ingrained into the culture of HN and other sites, but karma is dumb. In response to the bury, let me clarify. On HN, upvotes and downvotes allow a

I know it's ingrained into the culture of HN and other sites, but karma is dumb. In response to the bury, let me clarify. On HN, upvotes and downvotes allow a comment to stand on its own merit. Using amassed karma to determine the quality of an individual is dumb. Since IRC's nature is instant and ephemeral communication (yes, often logged, etc), it makes little sense to use a karma system for IRC. Individual comments can't be filtered or buried (they're instant!) so the only other option would be to filter people individually by karma. We call that a popularity contest, and THAT is dumb.