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I like the karma system overall, and I think the general quality of discussion on HN is evidence that things are mostly working well. The only thing I find off

I like the karma system overall, and I think the general quality of discussion on HN is evidence that things are mostly working well. The only thing I find off about it is the average karma on profile pages. Personally, I find that it subconsciously dissuades me from commenting anywhere that is likely to result in few/no upvotes. My first comment on a story might get 20, 40, 80 upvotes, but any extended discussion is going to be rather nested, and so you're essentially burning through your average as each comment sits with only one or two votes. Similarly, commenting on "unpopular" articles means few people will see your comment, so you're pulling your average down again. Should karma matter to me? Probably not. But I will confess to looking at people's profiles to see their average karma and time on HN as a way of knowing a bit more about them. I don't think it's unreasonable to feel that the average should be more representative than a straight average of all comment votes. I don't like to complain without offering a solution, so this would be mine: weight the comment average as a function of the overall points on an article, to allow for more conversation around niche topics. Weight comments according to how deep in a thread they are, to allow more in-depth conversations to occur without a karmic penalty. Karma can sometimes feel like a superficial way of "keeping score," but I think it serves a valuable role in promoting quality discussion. It still has room for improvement, though.

waterlesscloud 15y ago
Once I realized that most of my karma was coming from my most casual comments, I stopped attaching much importance to it at all.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  My main issue with that attitude is that it primarily comes from older users with a ton of karma. Of course you don't need to worry about it.
scrrr 15y ago
Karma matters to me. It puts the good replies on the top of the page, the bad ones move down. And that´s the main purpose I think.
- ams6110 15y ago
  That feature doesn't rely on showing you your karma at all though. Why does anyone care what their personal karma score is. I mean what difference does it really make, outside of this tiny corner of the internet? Or even here?
J3L2404 15y ago
Updates to your karma average are a rolling average and updated asychronously. Basically it takes your comments numbered 6-50, throws out the highest-scoring one, and averages them.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  If karma average were based on only those comments between 6 and 50 points, everyone's average would be between 6 and 50 points. That's not the case. Can you elaborate?
  - J3L2404 15y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927
    - jaysonelliot 15y ago
      I see, thanks. I misunderstood your comment to mean that karma was calculated on comments between 6 and 50 points, instead of what you meant, which is the last 50 comments minus the five most recent. Unfortunately, it doesn't weight for in-depth discussions or comments on less-popular articles.
      - loup-vaillant 15y ago
        In the hope you see my reply: LessWrong has a partial solution for this (possibly inherited from reddit). When you log in, you can see if anyone replied to one of your comments, and you can go to a page listing such replies. It is therefore encourages looong threads of discussions, much of which are worth my while in LessWrong. It is also possible to reply to years old comments. About the karma end of the problem, one could try to weight karma by the inverse of exposure. Right now, early comments are disproportionately voted up, while later comments can be nearly totally ignored even if they're very good. But that's a big change, easy to screw up (not to mention it may be a bad idea to begin with).
  - deleted 15y ago
devgutt 15y ago
I think "upvote" is good and help conversation, but i don´t like "downvote". I think that is unnecessary. Many times i saw comments heavily downvoted and valid to me. Vote what is good is sufficient for me.
- why-el 15y ago
  I agree here. If a comment is not upvoted, it will stay where it is, and probably go down the list of comments. On the other hand Downvoting, although it has some valid uses (Essentially keeping this place from turning into an uninteresting Reddit), sometimes is used by high karma users as a tool for merely disagreeing, which defeats its purpose.
gnosis 15y ago
"The only thing I find off about it is the average karma on profile pages. Personally, I find that it subconsciously dissuades me from commenting anywhere that is likely to result in few/no upvotes. My first comment on a story might get 20, 40, 80 upvotes, but any extended discussion is going to be rather nested, and so you're essentially burning through your average as each comment sits with only one or two votes. Similarly, commenting on "unpopular" articles means few people will see your comment, so you're pulling your average down again." It's not just commenting on unpopular articles and deeply nested discussions that will pull your average karma down, but commenting on old articles. By the time I find an interesting article to comment on, it will usually be at least a day old. Nevertheless, I tend to comment there anyway, in full knowledge that very few people will ever read my comment or upvote it, because most of the action on HN happens within the first day, and most people move on to the newest articles very quickly. The way HN handles average karma calculation in such circumstances is pretty sad because of the disincentive it places on people to comment on good older articles, which are often much more interesting and worthwhile than your typical new article. This problem is compounded by HN's attempts to disallow duplicate article postings (though there are ways around that), and lack of automatic linking to previous discussions on the same article (though manual linking is occasionally done by HN users themselves). In short, there should be a way to keep productive discussions going, rather than effectively placing a limit of about 1 day on any given discussion. I hate to praise web forums in any way, but I do think one thing they get right is to usually bring any threads which have been recently commented on back to the top. HN would benefit from a similar approach.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  This is one of the downsides to the karma game - people tend to be reluctant to do anything which will hurt their score. Stories are dead after about 12 hours, and almost nobody checks their comments unless they're in a flame war.

waterlesscloud 15y ago

Once I realized that most of my karma was coming from my most casual comments, I stopped attaching much importance to it at all.

anthonyb 15y ago
My main issue with that attitude is that it primarily comes from older users with a ton of karma. Of course you don't need to worry about it.

scrrr 15y ago

Karma matters to me. It puts the good replies on the top of the page, the bad ones move down. And that´s the main purpose I think.

ams6110 15y ago
That feature doesn't rely on showing you your karma at all though. Why does anyone care what their personal karma score is. I mean what difference does it really make, outside of this tiny corner of the internet? Or even here?

J3L2404 15y ago

Updates to your karma average are a rolling average and updated asychronously. Basically it takes your comments numbered 6-50, throws out the highest-scoring one, and averages them.

jaysonelliot 15y ago
If karma average were based on only those comments between 6 and 50 points, everyone's average would be between 6 and 50 points. That's not the case. Can you elaborate?
- J3L2404 15y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927
  - jaysonelliot 15y ago
    I see, thanks. I misunderstood your comment to mean that karma was calculated on comments between 6 and 50 points, instead of what you meant, which is the last 50 comments minus the five most recent. Unfortunately, it doesn't weight for in-depth discussions or comments on less-popular articles.
    - loup-vaillant 15y ago
      In the hope you see my reply: LessWrong has a partial solution for this (possibly inherited from reddit). When you log in, you can see if anyone replied to one of your comments, and you can go to a page listing such replies. It is therefore encourages looong threads of discussions, much of which are worth my while in LessWrong. It is also possible to reply to years old comments. About the karma end of the problem, one could try to weight karma by the inverse of exposure. Right now, early comments are disproportionately voted up, while later comments can be nearly totally ignored even if they're very good. But that's a big change, easy to screw up (not to mention it may be a bad idea to begin with).
- deleted 15y ago

devgutt 15y ago

I think "upvote" is good and help conversation, but i don´t like "downvote". I think that is unnecessary. Many times i saw comments heavily downvoted and valid to me. Vote what is good is sufficient for me.

why-el 15y ago
I agree here. If a comment is not upvoted, it will stay where it is, and probably go down the list of comments. On the other hand Downvoting, although it has some valid uses (Essentially keeping this place from turning into an uninteresting Reddit), sometimes is used by high karma users as a tool for merely disagreeing, which defeats its purpose.

gnosis 15y ago

"The only thing I find off about it is the average karma on profile pages. Personally, I find that it subconsciously dissuades me from commenting anywhere that is likely to result in few/no upvotes. My first comment on a story might get 20, 40, 80 upvotes, but any extended discussion is going to be rather nested, and so you're essentially burning through your average as each comment sits with only one or two votes. Similarly, commenting on "unpopular" articles means few people will see your comment, so you're pulling your average down again." It's not just commenting on unpopular articles and deeply nested discussions that will pull your average karma down, but commenting on old articles. By the time I find an interesting article to comment on, it will usually be at least a day old. Nevertheless, I tend to comment there anyway, in full knowledge that very few people will ever read my comment or upvote it, because most of the action on HN happens within the first day, and most people move on to the newest articles very quickly. The way HN handles average karma calculation in such circumstances is pretty sad because of the disincentive it places on people to comment on good older articles, which are often much more interesting and worthwhile than your typical new article. This problem is compounded by HN's attempts to disallow duplicate article postings (though there are ways around that), and lack of automatic linking to previous discussions on the same article (though manual linking is occasionally done by HN users themselves). In short, there should be a way to keep productive discussions going, rather than effectively placing a limit of about 1 day on any given discussion. I hate to praise web forums in any way, but I do think one thing they get right is to usually bring any threads which have been recently commented on back to the top. HN would benefit from a similar approach.

anthonyb 15y ago
This is one of the downsides to the karma game - people tend to be reluctant to do anything which will hurt their score. Stories are dead after about 12 hours, and almost nobody checks their comments unless they're in a flame war.