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I've always thought that Reddit would be better without displaying karma. What value does it provide except to create a perverse goal for some people?
by wvenable 7y ago
I've always thought that Reddit would be better without displaying karma. What value does it provide except to create a perverse goal for some people?
- austincheney 7y ago> What value does it provide Many people cannot form an original opinion. A vote count makes that decision for them.
- wvenable 7y agoI'm not talking about vote count, I'm talking about individual user's karma counts.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoDoesn't everyone benefit from the fact that there are people obsessed with finding content that appeals to them? It's like reposts: what do I care? Though I suppose you could argue this is good for their mental health. And I'm not convinced it would even have the tiniest impact on a polarized circlejerk like r/politics.
- cptskippy 7y agoIt provides sentiment without clutter. Instead of 1000 identical comments or 1 comment with 1000 "same" or "this" comments underneath.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoYou could still do that if the karma wasn't displayed.
- wvenable 7y agoI don't mean comment karma, I mean user karma.
- cortesoft 7y agoHmm, are people really looking at their total user karma? I admit that seeing my comments get upvoted gives me a hit of dopamine, knowing that that number of people were interested in what I said. However, I never look at my TOTAL karma, just each individual comment. I like knowing that THIS thing I said people agreed with.
- wvenable 7y agoI never look at my own karma either but then I'm also not actively trying to increase it. But reddit users do tell us themselves that they post things specifically for the karma. They also do things like post screenshots of threads instead of the threads themselves to get the karma from those posts. There is a whole host of behaviors on reddit around acquiring user karma. For individual post karma, I'm the same as you.
- criddell 7y agoThe value is there, but it goes to the company and not the users.
- umvi 7y agoOr better yet, make getting karma data a paid, rate-limited feature. 99% of people would not be willing to pay for it, but the data is there (for a price) if you want to crunch numbers or looks for trends. A "karma tax" if you will.
- munk-a 7y agoGetting not giving? I'm pretty confused here - wouldn't most people refuse to pay and be stuck at whatever the limit was before the first payment was required? That might cause an even weirder effect where having that level of karma was considered the "maximum genuine karma" and just lead to a much lower requirement when it comes to farming likes to boost views.
- umvi 7y agoI'm saying hide everybody's comment scores kind of like HN does. However, if you pay $1/mo for access to the karma API you can then have access to the comment scores. That's all. People can still upvote/downvote freely, they just can't see the scores unless they pay.
- munk-a 7y agoHrm, interesting... so it'd be less a product for common folks to judge others and move it almost exclusively into the realm of a thing to support advertisers who are hunting for "influencers" - interesting.
- jedberg 7y agoThey very first version of Reddit used spark lines instead of points. People hated it. We experimented multiple times with removing karma from the equation. It always reduced engagement. People just really need that dopamine hit of seeing their points go up. Honestly I prefer the way HN does it, where only the submitter can see their own points.
- Simon_says 7y agoIn hindsight, maybe optimizing for engagement also optimized for polarization?
- kaonashi 7y agoYou're probably correct, but what product owner is going to take the chance on purposefully chasing lower engagement?
- jedberg 7y agoHacker News. :)
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoAd-supported business can’t solve this problem.
- gordaco 7y agoConsidering that this is also the biggest problem regarding youtube, you may be right. However, if it's true, the consequences are terrifying, if you take into account that engagement is directly tied to the financial success of every company whose money comes from advertising. (And here it is: yet another reason to despise advertising and surveillance capitalism...). EDIT: typo.
- AlexDragusin 7y agoWell, engagement for the sake of karma is likely not a worthy engagement, I would consider reducing that sort of engagement a good thing. Surely it's not a black and white matter though. Without having seen what kind of content really gets moderated, I'd say HN got a good balance.
- ehnto 7y agoEven the ability to up or downvote I think takes away from the incentive to provide good discourse. Some people are content just down voting a perfectly reasonable argument rather than contributing to the conversation and having to reason out their opinions. You even see it here, where posts are greyed out but no one has given any reason why. I don't have a better way mind you. Unmoderated discourse tends to end up bad, and voting is a form of self moderation. The alternative of fully staffed moderation also has it's issues. Community building online is just a hard problem to solve. Just removing downvotes I think is a good step. Because if someone just agrees you aren't losing much by them upvoting instead of posting "me too!". But if someone feels like they disagree and want to downvote, that could be an interesting conversation that never happened.
- chr1 7y agoThis happens because people want a disagree button, but have only a milder version of flag button instead. Sometimes one just wants to support a viewpoint without bringing additional arguments. I think it would be better to display separate agree disagree and flag counters on each post, and not reduce karma if there are more disagree votes than agree.
- mc32 7y agoMaybe adjust the cost of upvoting and downvoting. So a downvote to a reputable commenter might cost 10 or 100 karma. Upvoting might also incur a cost. Maybe it should depend on the reputation of the post (post karma) or the poster (reputation) and also it should cost people with more karma more to vote (but not linearly). As a side-effect it would allow real-time insight into a sliver of online virtual economics.
- pjc50 7y agoStackoverflow "charges" you one point to downvote. You recieve 10 points for an upvote, which are free.
- wvenable 7y agoI think simply adding "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons and separate "off topic" or "downvote" button would make a big difference. What "up" and "down" means is a bit vague and everyone has a different opinion on the matter. I will readily upvote comments I agree with but I usually only downvote comments that add no value to the discussion rather than being something I disagree with. So even my own voting pattern on HN is asymmetric.
- dominotw 7y ago> a perverse goal for some people? Its not a perverse goal.
- wvenable 7y agoRacking up "Internet points" is not a perverse goal? I don't see how it provides value to either the person attempting to acquire these points or the visitors providing them.
- dominotw 7y ago> I don't see how it provides value to either the person attempting to acquire these points It obviously does. correct? why else would be they be doing it if it provides no value to them.
- wvenable 7y agoThat's begging the question. People do a lot of things that actively harmful to themselves and others -- my argument is that purposely acquiring karma, for the sole reason of increasing one's score, could very well be one of those things.
- dominotw 7y ago> People do a lot of things that actively harmful to themselves and others -- my argument is that purposely acquiring karma, for the sole reason of increasing one's score, could very well be one of those things. You are making a random and unsubstantiated claim that acquiring karma is somehow "harming" the person acquiring it. Onus is on you to backup your claim. Why would one assume that its obviously true. > That's begging the question I would say your point is this. "Begging the question is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion"
- wvenable 7y agoMy original comment was actually asking the question: what value to the user does acquiring karma provide? You begged the question by saying that acquiring karma must provide value because people are acquiring karma. That's the assuming the truth of the conclusion. I'm not strongly making the claim that acquiring karma is harmful but I'll re-iterate my original question: what is the value of acquiring karma for either the person doing it or the audience? My unsubstantiated feeling is that provides no value but I'd be interested in hearing a counter-argument.
- floatingatoll 7y agoI proposed it on HN for HN, to mixed reviews. A common sentiment was “if you can hide the counts from yourself, why should you be permitted to hide them from me without my consent?”. Still, it looks like the world is catching up to my idea. Hooray :) I continue to hope HN braves the ire and tries it out some week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267
- ggm 7y agoI've never looked at mine and I never look at others. Arguably a-socially, I treat each post and response as a discrete pair and gain pleasure from the depth of thread which follows but only ephemerally. Maybe karma is best self assessed?