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Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles? That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit eve
by jasonkester 16y ago
Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
- mryall 16y agoSurfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.
- oreilly 16y agoChange the ratio - rather then 1:1, give less points for an article submission and more for meaningful comments. Jasonkeste's idea for tying reputation to comments could be done with an icon. Our (New Zealand's) equivalent of ebay does this quite well.
- rbanffy 16y agoLately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity. Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem. I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree. Maybe Slashdot-style metamoderation...
- wladimir 16y agoJudging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
- rbanffy 16y agoGood point. Size of the tree plus total of delta-karma of the replies multiplied by a factor (may vary with distance from post).
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoThe very best submissions get virtually no discussion. One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments. Let V = votes Let C = comments Let IT = 1.0 Let R = V/C If R > IT then the article is "worth IT" Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1. If R < "the paper it's written on" then it's not worth the paper it's written on (not that it's written on paper, but you get the idea). But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.
- redthrowaway 16y ago"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion." I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoI think those good stories that generate good discussion still get more points than comments. With the really good stories, no matter how many people comment, more people upvote, because there are lurkers. It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.
- jcl 16y ago
- yuvadam 16y agoStack Overflow does this nicely - 5 points for a question upvote, 10 points for an answer upvote.
- biot 16y ago> Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma? Or consider making it logarithmic. Something like pi * log(x) is geeky and would reward a good submission without going overboard.
- regularfry 16y agoThat would reward making lots of mediocre submissions more than few good ones. I know which way round I'd prefer.
- biot 16y agoSomeone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale. The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?
- regularfry 16y agoThe maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma. Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.
- Tibbes 16y agoIndeed: to reward quality over quantity you'd need to use a function such as x^2, or probably x^2/C for some constant C. Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares. That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2) This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).
- bezidejni 16y agoI like the system on Reddit where link karma and comment karma is separated. That way, people whose main incentive to post links is to gain karma still get it, but it's also easy to see the karma gained on commenting. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.
- wladimir 16y agoThat'd be ideal. Comment karma is so much harder to get than link karma. It makes sense to split the two.
- mzl 16y agoI seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.
- jasonkester 16y agoFirst, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost. Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :) Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
- mzl 16y agoThanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread. I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing. Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :) * Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
- khafra 16y agoYou started me thinking about ways to normalize average karma, but I haven't come up with one that makes me happy yet: - adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing - adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers - adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment - penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way, yet?
- raquo 16y agoMaybe we just need a submission to cost X karma points to the submitter. Then people would think harder before submitting.
- Vivtek 16y agoThat wouldn't work for bot-submission of Jacques' posts, though. Unless it cost 50 or 100 points, which would make HNN a much, much quieter place.
- bmelton 16y agoAmen? Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone. For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles. So, the scenario would be like this: - new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission. - If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit. - If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit. There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
- silverskein 16y agoThe problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time. So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- _pius 16y agoYou haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own. Most people submit articles in some part because they receive karma points for interesting submissions. It's not just by magic that good articles "tend to find their way here."
- robryan 16y agoThe good articles arent the issue though, maybe we need some sort of penalty on bad articles that would prevent people posting anything and everything hoping at least something will catch on.
- uxp 16y agoI'm not much one for game theory, but this just came to mind. Maybe we shouldn't penalize articles that don't gain attention, but it should have a determined negative score in the back end, while displaying 0 or 1 to users on the front end. The initial score could be calculated somehow through the karma (or possibly comment karma average) of the submitter and length of time the submitter has been a member of HN. When a newer, but established, user submits an article, it could need up to 15 upvotes before it actually starts gaining the user karma/points, for example. The score could then start to adjust to it's actual total as it becomes more active. My only issue with actually penalizing articles that don't get attention is because some articles may be submitted a few times over the course of a day from different sources, yet the later submitted ones in what I have unscientifically observed seem to be the most active. The actual information in the article is completely relevant, but due to whatever probabilistic cause, they just don't get noticed. I don't think it's "right" to penalize a submitter because no one else was on the ball, so to speak.
- robryan 16y agoYour right, maybe it has to be about average score. People are going to submit good stuff that doesn't catch on. The only real behavior your trying to avoid is people submitting regardless of quality.
- Udo 16y agoSubmitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.
- bricestacey 16y agoYou can flag just about anything.
- Udo 16y agoThat's not enough. It's not enough to be able to kill a link, there should be a disincentive to having posted it in the first place.
- Sukotto 16y agoArticles can be flagged though. Perhaps a heavy penalty per flag? I think this is actually a pretty complex issue (social dynamics, reputation, incentives) so let us keep Mencken's Law firmly in mind For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
- markkat 16y agoI've built a HN-based site that uses karma as a currency, which I submitted a week ago, to little fanfare :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359935 In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karma, you cannot submit stories until you earn some. Here I was trying to limit the effect of users that are new, and of those that have not contributed appreciated content or comments. That said, you've got me rethinking the idea of karma for submissions... It might be better to have submissions only increase clout. -Therefore, it will only slightly increase a user's karma-earning rate. Good comments will be the best way to get karma. Yes. I am going to try that. Thanks!
- veyron 16y agoThis sounds similar to the Stack Overflow model [you take a penalty when you downvote]
- markkat 16y agoI don't have a SO account. Do you mean when someone downvotes you, or when you downvote someone else? Or both?
- veyron 16y agoTo downvote on SO you need a certain number of points, which you get by doing other activities [like posting or answering questions]. After reaching that threshold, you can choose to downvote a question or response, which costs you one point and costs the other person 2 points. I.e. If you wanted to downvote this post, i would lose 2 karma and you would lose 1.
- Herwig 16y agoHowever the system relies on upvotes to see good articles from the bad ones. So the system would still rely on upvotes but perhaps not give karma? #my2cents
- krschultz 16y agoAlso: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?
- elliottcarlson 16y agoThe only time I have taken karma in to consideration is when I disagree with someone either in principle or in technical merit. If I were to even respond to such a post, I want to know if I am dealing with a troll or someone who is a highly regarded member of the community because they have earned their karma. Basically, I let it influence how I might approach someone to a certain extent. Other than that, I could care less what my or anyone else's karma is.
- extension 16y agoRather than karma/comments I'd like to see karma/uniques. Keep count of the logged in users that have seen the comment. Use a little Javascript to figure out which comments have been visible in their browser window long enough to read them.
- guscost 16y agoHonestly, using the word "karma" to refer to votes just sounds arrogant. Real karma has nothing to do with human opinions, and any system that claims to quantize or measure it probably does more to encourage petty politics.
- PStamatiou 16y agoI'm in favor of karma to remain as it is. Why? When I have some long thoughts to share I break it off into it's own thorough post and submit it. I thought that was the preferred behavior around here.
- nexneo 16y agoThis could be avoid by giving karma points till 10 up votes on story. After that all up votes on story doesn't give any karma advantage. Still showing up votes on story make sense not karma advantage to submitter. It just foolish that some high profile story give someone lots of karma advantage then good commenters because someone submitted it first.