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I'm not crazy about average points per comment. If you make a good comment very early on a popular post, you get a lot more karma for your comment than if you m
by raganwald 16y ago
I'm not crazy about average points per comment. If you make a good comment very early on a popular post, you get a lot more karma for your comment than if you make the exact same comment late in the posts's life or worse still on an unpopular post. That's fine, exposing good things to fewer eyeballs is less valuable, and that's why you get less karma for it. But if it gets a few upvotes it's still helping someone, somewhere.
However, average karma per post gently nudges us towards avoiding circumstances where a comment might get low karma, such as on a post that is less popular.
Whereas, total karma encourages users to let a thousand flowers bloom. There's a disincentive to post anything that might get downvoted, and that's fine, but otherwise there's no harm in making a comment anywhere and not worrying about whether your seed has fallen on fertile ground.
You could "fix' things by weighting karma per post by eyeballs, or disregard average karma per post. I choose the latter course as I'm not a moderator and even if I were I'm unsure how the number relates to behaviour HN is trying to encourage.
- sahillavingia 16y agoTotally agree. Sometimes I type up a controversial reply, and then scrap it because I feel like it's going to be received poorly (took me a bit of thinking to post this comment, even!). I'm sure a lot of good discussions never exist because of this. Even without avg. karma though, reputation is still at risk, so the problem won't be solved by removing/showing that statistic.
- olalonde 16y agoControversial comments sometimes get down voted but other times get up voted as hell. I think on average, it's quite safe from a karma perspective to be controversial even though you have to take the occasional down votes.
- brudgers 16y agoThere are certain topics which are more likely to be downvoted - criticism of Steve Jobs is an example (and conversely criticism of Steve Balmer is likely to be upvoted). There's nothing wrong with caring about HN karma, so long as you care about karma less than you care about speaking your mind.
- smiler 16y agoOr you could not just worry about your karma score, or your average and just post when you think you've got something to say and say it. I don't get the obsession with karma and people getting annoyed when they get down voted. Be yourself and if people disagree so be it
- raganwald 16y agoI think we're in violent agreement. I just want to note that 'worrying about it when deciding what/whether to post' is not the same thing as 'finding a discussion about it interesting.' At this point in software history, all software is social software. Therefore, discussions about social behaviour and how it is affected by mechanisms and features is extremely relevant to the business of making software. So I'm fascinated by the subject of karma even if I don't try very hard to accumulate any.
- mkr-hn 16y agoHN is based on karma--you only get access to certain features at given thresholds. It's something you have to care about if you ever want to be able to make full use of the site. I think a time-based system might go along with karma well. If you stay above a certain level for long enough, you get access to the next feature level. You still have to work your way up the karma tree, but you're not doing it for the features.
- grandalf 16y agowait, what are these levels? I don't know if I have ever been aware of this other than just the downvote privilege based on average comment score.
- nostrademons 16y agoIf you post a lot, the noise of one or two unpopular comments gets drowned out. I'm at 14,613 karma with an average of 6.02. If this post gets downvoted to -30, I might end up with an average of 6.01. I doubt I'd notice.
- jacquesm 16y agoIt's not your overall average, but over a much smaller set (the last N comments, with N being a fairly small integer), 50 or 100 or so.