12 ms·

Website scores kill our success, waste our time

theamk 6y ago
Those scores are a part of the game, but that doesn’t mean they are meaningless. They are just as meaningful as goals in soccer, or stats in RPG, or gold coins in platformer games. That means: realize this is a game, understand rules, and decide if you want to play this game for the score. If not, don’t waste time of them. If yes, don’t forget to periodically re-evaluate if this game is still worth your time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
amarant 6y ago
Is this guy saying you can't pay rent with internet points? Huh...
onion2k 6y ago
HN karma isn't important? I've wasted my life.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  I hear if you collect 10 million karma you can trade it in for a pack of Juicy Fruit or Big Red, but that could be entirely hearsay. I'm still optomistic and hoping for the best.
- teej 6y ago
  Back in the day they would prioritize high karma HN users for YC startup school invites. That’s how I first met pg.
amelius 6y ago
Scores often don't just benefit the website owners, but arguably also the other users (and thus also you). Without karma, HN could be a different place.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the threshold is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it has much actual utility past that.
  - bigwavedave 6y ago
    > I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the threshold is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it has much actual utility past that. I have to agree (at least, in my case). I know that when I first started here, I was a lot more reactionary and frequently found myself wishing for a way to downvote people who disagreed with my perspective, but I couldn't act on that immaturity because of the required ramp up. I'm still human, I'm still reactive- but instead of just saying "I disagree; you're canceled," it's forced me to take a moment and actually focus on both perspectives and the merits that other paradigms offer. I'm not anywhere close to perfect, but it's certainly helped me grow :).
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Is it a fixed numner or it depends on the average upvotes? I find much more people misusing it than before, but maybe it's just more visible as the total number of votes increased a lot in the past few years.
undefined1 6y ago
I think scores on github, stackoverflow and HN may be a net win for all concerned. Twitter and Facebook scores on the other hand... a massive net loss for all but Twitter, FB, their employees and shareholders.
- kodah 6y ago
  I'm not really convinced GitHub scoring is realistic or even really representative of much. Kubernetes has tons of stars, yet how many stars do all the packages that Kubernetes consumes have? The ingredients and the arrangement of the parts are often more important than the whole; yet look who is rewarded. HN scores, to me, stop mattering past about 500, maybe 1000. By then you should know the guidelines, how to conduct some proper discourse, and should have dropped baggage from previous websites like Twitter or Reddit.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    I like having more green boxes than not on github. But at least 10% of my little green boxes are just commits little nonsense commits I made for the sake of getting a green box. Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one of my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope. Will a potential employer look and see a lot of green boxes and think that makes me more qualified or passionate? You bet your ass they will and have. Is that good? I don't think so but I'll keep doing it as long as it helps me get paid.
    - MaulingMonkey 6y ago
      > Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one of my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope. What they'll do instead is look at a semi-random sampling of your repositories and commits. They don't need to look at every commit to get a statistically meaningful sampling of what your commits look like, and they can look at even less to get a vague, rough idea of what you're up to.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      That’s the sort of thing I thought employers did when I was younger, but let me disabuse you of that superstition before you waste more of your time. And if you really do believe it, then you can fill in a 100% green grid with a trivial script.
tyingq 6y ago
I think there are some web scores that are actually useful. The ssllabs one comes to mind.
eivarv 6y ago
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". That's not to say anything about any beneficial side-effects, though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Generalization_by_Marilyn_Strathern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Generalizatio...
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  (I am the OP.) That is certainly valid for many simplistic measures. But is it possible to develop measures that are resistant to being engineered? That may negate the article's premise, though...
  - teddyh 6y ago
    This one, maybe? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
aeturnum 6y ago
The sociologist in me suspects that scoring systems are popular because they instrumentalize interaction in a sufficiently ambiguous way to do work for many audiences. It's really useful that comment scores have vague relationships to a lot of socially important qualities (interest / sentiment / etc). I 'use' changes in my HN karma as a cue that someone is interacting with one of my comments. For me the karma system could be totally replaced by reply notifications - but others might use it differently. Keeping the score system basic leaves each person to have whatever thoughts they want about their karma without the website telling them how to feel. There's a dark pattern aspect to this where web sites can foster unhealthy levels of interaction while saying that's not what they intended. There's also an emergent behavior side where scoring systems are used in ways the makers can't predict.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  (I am the OP.) The cynic in me says it's just gamification to maximize site owner's net worth. But maybe it's like "teaching to the test", where if you're teaching to a well regarded test, you're actually doing a good class. Extending the analogy, if the site's value is well aligned with your self-value (quality of the test), then playing the site's score game (teaching to the test) may be beneficial to you? Here's an example: I invested some time a few years ago to improve the quality of a few Wikipedia articles. I later found very similar reasoning to what I got into these articles in legislative debates. I think I had a hand in influencing something important to me by updating Wikipedia.
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    I totally agree that many sites put the scores in to maximize revenue. I'm just trying to consider scoring systems in the wider context of user <-> website interaction techniques. If score systems were just to generate revenue, I'd imagine that users would have a roundly negative view of them like dark patterns that help revenue (spam, tracking, sponcon). I think you're absolutely correct about scoring systems reflecting your position in the ontology of the sites' creator, and so if you want what the site wants you want your score to go up. I suspect that the popularity of scoring systems comes from users understanding they could be bad or good and being drawn in to the enjoyable play of discovering what their score reflects based on their own experience.
viseztrance 6y ago
On stackoverflow you can spend your reputation on bounties for certain questions (niche, difficult) that would otherwise get ignored. Personally I spent about 1000 reputation points on those, and some of the answers were surprisingly good.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  (I am the OP.) That's an excellent counterexample. Just out of curiosity, how many hours did you invest to get to the 1000 points?
  - loloquwowndueo 6y ago
    Sometimes if you give a good answer it will just sit there collecting points for all eternity. I did that a couple of times and I have several thousand points after a few years.
  - viseztrance 6y ago
    As someone has already replied, you slowly gather passive points from your earlier questions. My account is from 2009, with 33 questions, and 120 answers and 10K points. It's a tough estimate, but I felt like I received my money's worth, sort of speak. However, bare in mind that contributing was significantly easier 10 years ago, hence why most of my points stem from older questions and answers.
- k_sze 6y ago
  The dynamics of the StackOverflow/StackExchange reputation system is interesting. The way I look at it is that, if your question meets these two conditions, you shouldn't have to put a bounty on it: 1. it is phrased/framed in a way that is palpable; 2. it is intrinsically interesting. With that in mind, I've never put any bounty on my questions on StackOverflow. But then I wonder, can reputation points be "invested"? Would it be possible to give a little push to my question by spending some points on a bounty, and then earn them all back and more via upvotes? Has anybody successfully done that?
  - 6y ago
endisneigh 6y ago
I like this site, but honestly the most annoying thing is that there isn't a way to opt-out of the karma system visibly. Why can't there be a check box that stops showing me my karma and greying out downvoted posts? There's no way it would take more than an hour to implement this.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  Seems like a user style sheet would fix this.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Dang actually considers the comment fading an absolutely essential feature: > The fading is an important element of HN's design—I don't mean its web design, I mean its community design. It's one critical way in which the community signals that it has found something wrong with a comment. > These signals are extremely important for calibrating users' perceptions of the community—especially new users. > I think it was one of pg's master strokes actually. For all its annoyance, it creates important feedback loops, both within the community and between the community and the outside world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334263
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    the same could be said about flagged comments but you can opt out of the default behavior there. there's basically no excuse imo. if this site was open source a I'd create a pull request, but alas.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      You can opt into seeing dead comments, but they're still clearly delineated as dead, alongside maximum fading.
      - endisneigh 6y ago
        yes, exactly - if what I described existed you could still see your karma by clicking your profile and downvoted comments could still be marked as such by simply saying so instead of ruining accessibility and graying it out, making it harder to read. the ability to click the comment and see it no longer grayed out isn't really a solution since it's still harder to read the comment and ascertain whether it would be worth clicking it to begin with.
noncoml 6y ago
Yeah. Fuck scores. Downvote to oblivion baby!
runawaybottle 6y ago
The author is trying to fight human nature. Deprecating scores via cold turkey won’t work. You have to iteratively create newer scoring systems until we finally end up with a scoring system we all agree is trivial and ridiculous (e.g HS Diploma). That’s if you really want to break systems. So take Leetcode - I’d like to see a new system that cuts it down to about 500 questions across 8 classes (maybe we can live without topological sort questions). As it stands now, Leetcode is adding more and more questions and more and more topics, so the machine gets stronger. Breaking the system requires an iterative approach in the opposite direction. That’s if anyone’s serious about it. But alas, what is the motivation to be serious about it? People gain their status by passing LC, or having high HN karma, so what incentive do the winners, ergo gate-keepers, have in wanting to break the system? It would take sheer principle, which brings me back to my initial point. You are fighting human nature. We are not enlightened, competition is a breeding ground for all things reptilian that are left over from evolution. Gets back on high horse, rides away (flings cape back so the wind glamorously catches it).
jariel 6y ago
For github, there's no point in scores. For HN, I'd rather it be hidden, something people can peek at if they really want to. For StackOverflow - a simple rank system would be nice, because you really want to know the cred of someone piping in. You get points (rouhgly hidden) and then a public badge for rank. Very simple, like 4 or 5 ranks max, that's it. I use StackOverflow but have never bothered to investigate the point system deeply I find it confusing and not hugely relevant and I am not alone. For Twitter/Instagram/TikTok - there actually is something to likes. Perhaps they could flag content as being 'big' 'super big' and 'viral' or something so that people don't worry fret about numbers but at the same time we have some instinct as to how popular something is, even if we concede that it's a very crude measure of anything.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  > For StackOverflow - a simple rank system would be nice There is one which is based on your rank as a user against every other user. The problem is that SO has 15+ million users, anyone who's able to gain a reputation of more than a few thousand ends up in the top 0.1% or so because there's such a long tail of low/no-rep users. They should probably work on fixing this because it's a bit artificial. I'm one of 976 users out of these 15M+ that has a rep of over 100k (112k), I don't contribute much now, but still accrue points for upvotes on past answers (rightly or wrongly). Though there is a daily rep cap to prevent this getting out of control, but John Skeet :/, that said I did put a lot of work into these answers at the time, so why not keep accruing points, even if my participation has waned. I dunno, I don't really care much now.
AdrianB1 6y ago
I find HN score partially useful - as an aggregate it tells me nothing, but the score per comment tells me when people disagree, it is a feedback loop. Sometimes I don't figure or disagree with the feedback, but it is a lot better to have it than not to have it. I don't care of any other score in any other place, it tells me nothing.
shinycode 6y ago
Personally I couldn’t care less about all those scores. Why should they mean anything to me ? I’ve been on all the same websites as you for years, when I can contribute I do it. When I find a good answer or topic that unstuck me or help me I’m glad. Beyond that it’s noise that I choose to ignore. I chose that online reputation will not have any importance for me and I value this. I don’t want people to « know » me neither companies beyond that’s necessary. My value is not defined by those systems and those virtual points and the idea of chasing them makes me uncomfortable. I used to do all that but like any game, it’s almost pointless and a waste of time in the end so for me I choose not to play, even if I’m « no one » or « invisible ». That’s ok
forgotmypw17 6y ago
on my sites, the user,s karma score is directly proportional to their voting weight.
nitwit005 6y ago
I tend to see it as having an impact with new users, but almost everyone stops caring fairly quickly. You see the same sort of effect with some video games where they make highly visible score or damage numbers, which is motivational early on, but a lot of people find the setting to turn it off if they play it for a while.
yoz-y 6y ago
While I agree in principle, I don't think these three sites in particular are good examples against scores. If you completely ignore the scores, just using these three sites "correctly" will naturally increase your karma. I strongly suspect the people who are on any of these sites for maximizing the score are in a vanishingly small minority.
floatingatoll 6y ago
OP, you’ll be interested in my proposal from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267

Those scores are a part of the game, but that doesn’t mean they are meaningless. They are just as meaningful as goals in soccer, or stats in RPG, or gold coins in platformer games. That means: realize this is a game, understand rules, and decide if you want to play this game for the score. If not, don’t waste time of them. If yes, don’t forget to periodically re-evaluate if this game is still worth your time.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

amarant 6y ago

Is this guy saying you can't pay rent with internet points? Huh...

onion2k 6y ago

HN karma isn't important? I've wasted my life.

Frost1x 6y ago
I hear if you collect 10 million karma you can trade it in for a pack of Juicy Fruit or Big Red, but that could be entirely hearsay. I'm still optomistic and hoping for the best.
teej 6y ago
Back in the day they would prioritize high karma HN users for YC startup school invites. That’s how I first met pg.

amelius 6y ago

Scores often don't just benefit the website owners, but arguably also the other users (and thus also you). Without karma, HN could be a different place.

tyingq 6y ago
I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the threshold is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it has much actual utility past that.
- bigwavedave 6y ago
  > I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the threshold is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it has much actual utility past that. I have to agree (at least, in my case). I know that when I first started here, I was a lot more reactionary and frequently found myself wishing for a way to downvote people who disagreed with my perspective, but I couldn't act on that immaturity because of the required ramp up. I'm still human, I'm still reactive- but instead of just saying "I disagree; you're canceled," it's forced me to take a moment and actually focus on both perspectives and the merits that other paradigms offer. I'm not anywhere close to perfect, but it's certainly helped me grow :).
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Is it a fixed numner or it depends on the average upvotes? I find much more people misusing it than before, but maybe it's just more visible as the total number of votes increased a lot in the past few years.

undefined1 6y ago

I think scores on github, stackoverflow and HN may be a net win for all concerned. Twitter and Facebook scores on the other hand... a massive net loss for all but Twitter, FB, their employees and shareholders.

kodah 6y ago
I'm not really convinced GitHub scoring is realistic or even really representative of much. Kubernetes has tons of stars, yet how many stars do all the packages that Kubernetes consumes have? The ingredients and the arrangement of the parts are often more important than the whole; yet look who is rewarded. HN scores, to me, stop mattering past about 500, maybe 1000. By then you should know the guidelines, how to conduct some proper discourse, and should have dropped baggage from previous websites like Twitter or Reddit.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  I like having more green boxes than not on github. But at least 10% of my little green boxes are just commits little nonsense commits I made for the sake of getting a green box. Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one of my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope. Will a potential employer look and see a lot of green boxes and think that makes me more qualified or passionate? You bet your ass they will and have. Is that good? I don't think so but I'll keep doing it as long as it helps me get paid.
  - MaulingMonkey 6y ago
    > Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one of my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope. What they'll do instead is look at a semi-random sampling of your repositories and commits. They don't need to look at every commit to get a statistically meaningful sampling of what your commits look like, and they can look at even less to get a vague, rough idea of what you're up to.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    That’s the sort of thing I thought employers did when I was younger, but let me disabuse you of that superstition before you waste more of your time. And if you really do believe it, then you can fill in a 100% green grid with a trivial script.

tyingq 6y ago

I think there are some web scores that are actually useful. The ssllabs one comes to mind.

eivarv 6y ago

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". That's not to say anything about any beneficial side-effects, though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Generalization_by_Marilyn_Strathern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Generalizatio...

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
(I am the OP.) That is certainly valid for many simplistic measures. But is it possible to develop measures that are resistant to being engineered? That may negate the article's premise, though...
- teddyh 6y ago
  This one, maybe? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

aeturnum 6y ago

The sociologist in me suspects that scoring systems are popular because they instrumentalize interaction in a sufficiently ambiguous way to do work for many audiences. It's really useful that comment scores have vague relationships to a lot of socially important qualities (interest / sentiment / etc). I 'use' changes in my HN karma as a cue that someone is interacting with one of my comments. For me the karma system could be totally replaced by reply notifications - but others might use it differently. Keeping the score system basic leaves each person to have whatever thoughts they want about their karma without the website telling them how to feel. There's a dark pattern aspect to this where web sites can foster unhealthy levels of interaction while saying that's not what they intended. There's also an emergent behavior side where scoring systems are used in ways the makers can't predict.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
(I am the OP.) The cynic in me says it's just gamification to maximize site owner's net worth. But maybe it's like "teaching to the test", where if you're teaching to a well regarded test, you're actually doing a good class. Extending the analogy, if the site's value is well aligned with your self-value (quality of the test), then playing the site's score game (teaching to the test) may be beneficial to you? Here's an example: I invested some time a few years ago to improve the quality of a few Wikipedia articles. I later found very similar reasoning to what I got into these articles in legislative debates. I think I had a hand in influencing something important to me by updating Wikipedia.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  I totally agree that many sites put the scores in to maximize revenue. I'm just trying to consider scoring systems in the wider context of user <-> website interaction techniques. If score systems were just to generate revenue, I'd imagine that users would have a roundly negative view of them like dark patterns that help revenue (spam, tracking, sponcon). I think you're absolutely correct about scoring systems reflecting your position in the ontology of the sites' creator, and so if you want what the site wants you want your score to go up. I suspect that the popularity of scoring systems comes from users understanding they could be bad or good and being drawn in to the enjoyable play of discovering what their score reflects based on their own experience.

viseztrance 6y ago

On stackoverflow you can spend your reputation on bounties for certain questions (niche, difficult) that would otherwise get ignored. Personally I spent about 1000 reputation points on those, and some of the answers were surprisingly good.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
(I am the OP.) That's an excellent counterexample. Just out of curiosity, how many hours did you invest to get to the 1000 points?
- loloquwowndueo 6y ago
  Sometimes if you give a good answer it will just sit there collecting points for all eternity. I did that a couple of times and I have several thousand points after a few years.
- viseztrance 6y ago
  As someone has already replied, you slowly gather passive points from your earlier questions. My account is from 2009, with 33 questions, and 120 answers and 10K points. It's a tough estimate, but I felt like I received my money's worth, sort of speak. However, bare in mind that contributing was significantly easier 10 years ago, hence why most of my points stem from older questions and answers.
k_sze 6y ago
The dynamics of the StackOverflow/StackExchange reputation system is interesting. The way I look at it is that, if your question meets these two conditions, you shouldn't have to put a bounty on it: 1. it is phrased/framed in a way that is palpable; 2. it is intrinsically interesting. With that in mind, I've never put any bounty on my questions on StackOverflow. But then I wonder, can reputation points be "invested"? Would it be possible to give a little push to my question by spending some points on a bounty, and then earn them all back and more via upvotes? Has anybody successfully done that?
- 6y ago

endisneigh 6y ago

I like this site, but honestly the most annoying thing is that there isn't a way to opt-out of the karma system visibly. Why can't there be a check box that stops showing me my karma and greying out downvoted posts? There's no way it would take more than an hour to implement this.

mattgreenrocks 6y ago
Seems like a user style sheet would fix this.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Dang actually considers the comment fading an absolutely essential feature: > The fading is an important element of HN's design—I don't mean its web design, I mean its community design. It's one critical way in which the community signals that it has found something wrong with a comment. > These signals are extremely important for calibrating users' perceptions of the community—especially new users. > I think it was one of pg's master strokes actually. For all its annoyance, it creates important feedback loops, both within the community and between the community and the outside world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334263
- endisneigh 6y ago
  the same could be said about flagged comments but you can opt out of the default behavior there. there's basically no excuse imo. if this site was open source a I'd create a pull request, but alas.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    You can opt into seeing dead comments, but they're still clearly delineated as dead, alongside maximum fading.
    - endisneigh 6y ago
      yes, exactly - if what I described existed you could still see your karma by clicking your profile and downvoted comments could still be marked as such by simply saying so instead of ruining accessibility and graying it out, making it harder to read. the ability to click the comment and see it no longer grayed out isn't really a solution since it's still harder to read the comment and ascertain whether it would be worth clicking it to begin with.

noncoml 6y ago

Yeah. Fuck scores. Downvote to oblivion baby!

runawaybottle 6y ago

The author is trying to fight human nature. Deprecating scores via cold turkey won’t work. You have to iteratively create newer scoring systems until we finally end up with a scoring system we all agree is trivial and ridiculous (e.g HS Diploma). That’s if you really want to break systems. So take Leetcode - I’d like to see a new system that cuts it down to about 500 questions across 8 classes (maybe we can live without topological sort questions). As it stands now, Leetcode is adding more and more questions and more and more topics, so the machine gets stronger. Breaking the system requires an iterative approach in the opposite direction. That’s if anyone’s serious about it. But alas, what is the motivation to be serious about it? People gain their status by passing LC, or having high HN karma, so what incentive do the winners, ergo gate-keepers, have in wanting to break the system? It would take sheer principle, which brings me back to my initial point. You are fighting human nature. We are not enlightened, competition is a breeding ground for all things reptilian that are left over from evolution. Gets back on high horse, rides away (flings cape back so the wind glamorously catches it).

jariel 6y ago

For github, there's no point in scores. For HN, I'd rather it be hidden, something people can peek at if they really want to. For StackOverflow - a simple rank system would be nice, because you really want to know the cred of someone piping in. You get points (rouhgly hidden) and then a public badge for rank. Very simple, like 4 or 5 ranks max, that's it. I use StackOverflow but have never bothered to investigate the point system deeply I find it confusing and not hugely relevant and I am not alone. For Twitter/Instagram/TikTok - there actually is something to likes. Perhaps they could flag content as being 'big' 'super big' and 'viral' or something so that people don't worry fret about numbers but at the same time we have some instinct as to how popular something is, even if we concede that it's a very crude measure of anything.

teh_klev 6y ago
> For StackOverflow - a simple rank system would be nice There is one which is based on your rank as a user against every other user. The problem is that SO has 15+ million users, anyone who's able to gain a reputation of more than a few thousand ends up in the top 0.1% or so because there's such a long tail of low/no-rep users. They should probably work on fixing this because it's a bit artificial. I'm one of 976 users out of these 15M+ that has a rep of over 100k (112k), I don't contribute much now, but still accrue points for upvotes on past answers (rightly or wrongly). Though there is a daily rep cap to prevent this getting out of control, but John Skeet :/, that said I did put a lot of work into these answers at the time, so why not keep accruing points, even if my participation has waned. I dunno, I don't really care much now.

AdrianB1 6y ago

I find HN score partially useful - as an aggregate it tells me nothing, but the score per comment tells me when people disagree, it is a feedback loop. Sometimes I don't figure or disagree with the feedback, but it is a lot better to have it than not to have it. I don't care of any other score in any other place, it tells me nothing.

shinycode 6y ago

Personally I couldn’t care less about all those scores. Why should they mean anything to me ? I’ve been on all the same websites as you for years, when I can contribute I do it. When I find a good answer or topic that unstuck me or help me I’m glad. Beyond that it’s noise that I choose to ignore. I chose that online reputation will not have any importance for me and I value this. I don’t want people to « know » me neither companies beyond that’s necessary. My value is not defined by those systems and those virtual points and the idea of chasing them makes me uncomfortable. I used to do all that but like any game, it’s almost pointless and a waste of time in the end so for me I choose not to play, even if I’m « no one » or « invisible ». That’s ok

forgotmypw17 6y ago

on my sites, the user,s karma score is directly proportional to their voting weight.

nitwit005 6y ago

I tend to see it as having an impact with new users, but almost everyone stops caring fairly quickly. You see the same sort of effect with some video games where they make highly visible score or damage numbers, which is motivational early on, but a lot of people find the setting to turn it off if they play it for a while.

yoz-y 6y ago

While I agree in principle, I don't think these three sites in particular are good examples against scores. If you completely ignore the scores, just using these three sites "correctly" will naturally increase your karma. I strongly suspect the people who are on any of these sites for maximizing the score are in a vanishingly small minority.

floatingatoll 6y ago

OP, you’ll be interested in my proposal from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267