5 ms·

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinc

This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this. > Speed percentile: 98.82% While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research... It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, because I tell myself I'm above accumulating imaginary points on the internet, but obviously, I don't seem to be. In some ways, it's curious. My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. EDIT: After thinking about it some more, I've decided karma isn't entirely worthless in real life. It is a metric that lets you know how well other people like your written work. Over time, I've slowly come to realize what will get upvoted and what will not. This ability could have interesting repercussions in the way I write about my research, or the way that I craft something like grant or fellowship applications. Every person is different, but posting on HN reveals to me that, in the aggregate, there are certain things you can say that have a certain appeal to others, and the capacity to recognize this could in fact be useful in many life situations.

andreasvc 14y ago
> My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. It doesn't seem surprising to me. It takes effort to recognize quality, most people aren't going to bother. It makes sense that quality is hard to measure, because if it weren't it would most likely be easier to produce. Perhaps the score should be corrected for length and how deep in the thread a comment is, but getting it right is probably more trouble than it's worth.
- a_p 14y ago
  I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments. The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods. The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.
  - andreasvc 14y ago
    I don't think it's etiquette, but rather disinterest. As soon as a comment is specialized, it has a smaller audience and hence draws from a smaller pool of potential upvotes. The problem with Slashdot you cite is interesting. It is related to more general problems with crowdsourcing. Wikipedia is successful but sometimes you really notice that an article is written by different people with different viewpoints. Similarly, a "democratic" model for science, where instead of peer review papers are upvoted, does not seem very attractive. Perhaps this all boils down to the notion that neither truth nor quality are democratic; i.e., the average opinion is not a good estimate of them.
mjn 14y ago
On the last point, one thing I've taken away from the HN karma system is that your votes are most highly correlated with the general traffic around a discussion, more than with anything specific to the comment. Posting almost anything decent on a story that sits on the front page for a day will get you double-digit upvotes, especially if it's an early comment. But posting something in an article that only briefly hits the front page will not get much attention. Come to think of it, that does transfer to both business and academia to some extent.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Are you suggesting that a knack for timing and an ability to deliver something that others value might be individual qualities which YC might wish to develop in potential applicants who participate on HN?
  - mjn 14y ago
    I don't see it as very HN-specific. It's the exact same pattern you find at Reddit and Slashdot, so if YC is mainly attempting to cultivate that property, looking for users with the highest Reddit karma might be a good strategy (and they've proven themselves to a larger audience, probably more representative of average consumers). The negative way of looking at it is that it's most important just to be in the general vicinity of activity and say something with either broad appeal, or provocation. In academia this is becoming a common strategy with the rise of metrics. Find a hot area, publish a paper with a linkbaity title and prominent keyword placement, and wait for the citations to roll in. In business, it's the strategy of choosing your field of endeavor by picking the places where the most money is flowing around, and then just doing something average in that space.
    - brudgers 14y ago
      YC can structure HN to simulate market conditions. They cannot do that with Reddit.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    What you're describing is equally true of stand-up comedians as entrepreners and technical people.
zalzane 14y ago
>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system. This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it. The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful. Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?
- petenixey 14y ago
  I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement. Karma's value to the casual visitor is in communicating quality content that's been flagged by the community worker bees - the karma "waggle dance" :) From that perspective you want to be critical and only add weight to the "best things". However karma also plays a very significant role in guiding people as to how to modify their behaviour such that the community appreciates them. We all want to be liked by communities we identify with and karma is a powerful tool to see how we can "fit in". Karma is an incredibly powerful tool to communicate in a very discrete way to new community members how they can establish themselves. As the karma-moderator I find myself looking to give the community ways award karma wherever I can. I'm not worried about how insignificant the effort that it was rewarding; all I want to do is give people encouragement when they do something (anything) the community appreciates.
  - kstenerud 14y ago
    Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob. This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc). The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.
tikhonj 14y ago
This also depends on what your interests are. For example, my primary interests are in programming languages, functional programming, type theory and so on. My highest voted comments have mostly been fairly long ones in these topics. Moreover, most of them were pretty constructive: things like explaining how to generalize pattern-matching, how typeclasses are useful, what FRP is or even just how your editor can display Haskell syntax with Unicode. (It's like an awesome version of syntax highlighting.) Admittedly, my single highest-scoring post was a bit less constructive: a rant about Go. However, in my defense, it was a long rant with substantial details and examples. And, honestly, I'd be extremely happy if it saved some people from learning Go and got them to consider Haskell or OCaml instead.
dakimov 14y ago
Basically, be as mediocre and stereotypic as possible, conform to the crowd, please everyone, this is what you are talking about? Maybe, it's an inherent problem with the "karma" system. It encourages you to avoid saying what you really think unless you are a Mr. or Ms. Mediocrity. This gets even nastier considering that most people are narrow-minded and aggressive.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
brudgers 14y ago
I believe that your "Edit" hits the entire purpose of karma - encourage better writing. Karma for good posts. Karma for good submissions. What is sometimes a struggle is that better writing is not always what we wish it would be. Sometimes is well reasoned explanations. Sometimes it is passionate argument. And often, highly rated comments and articles become highly rated because of timing. Sometimes it is just showing up (80% of the time, Woody Allen may have said). It's satisfying to make a pitch perfect comment - even more so I find when it isn't snark or mean. I know what my best comments have been, and I know these are not the same as my highest rated. My best comments have been ones that I've cared about and some of those have even gone negative.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  I basically ignore karma these days. It doesn't encourage better writing, it encourages more off the cuff funny one liners. Here's an experiment of mine from a couple of months ago, on a duplicate news post: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=anthonyb+unflag&sortby=points+desc&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=anthon... Do I really deserve that 69 points of karma? Is that 20 or 30 or 69 times more valuable than other posts where I've spent a lot more effort? Perhaps this is where some of the 'snark' is coming from. In the race to get more karma, people are looking for the cheap throwaway one liner that everyone will snicker at and upvote.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Karma is probably more closely related to how popular your opinion is on a given subject in the hacker news community. As you said it does not really encourage better writing, while there is sometimes a correlation between a good post and many upvotes, especially on very technical subjects. Also, Karma on news submissions has become a race to be the first to publish the latest techcrunch news or related sites, so it's not all about comments or contents.
robryan 14y ago
It depends on the topic, lots of popular legal based threads have had a very in depth reply from grellas with a ton of upvotes. I think in that situation although not everyone would fully grasp the content they are upvoting in appreciation that someone who is an expert in the field has taken the time to explain and simplify the complexities of a legal case or argument.

andreasvc 14y ago

> My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure. It doesn't seem surprising to me. It takes effort to recognize quality, most people aren't going to bother. It makes sense that quality is hard to measure, because if it weren't it would most likely be easier to produce. Perhaps the score should be corrected for length and how deep in the thread a comment is, but getting it right is probably more trouble than it's worth.

a_p 14y ago
I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments. The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods. The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  I don't think it's etiquette, but rather disinterest. As soon as a comment is specialized, it has a smaller audience and hence draws from a smaller pool of potential upvotes. The problem with Slashdot you cite is interesting. It is related to more general problems with crowdsourcing. Wikipedia is successful but sometimes you really notice that an article is written by different people with different viewpoints. Similarly, a "democratic" model for science, where instead of peer review papers are upvoted, does not seem very attractive. Perhaps this all boils down to the notion that neither truth nor quality are democratic; i.e., the average opinion is not a good estimate of them.

mjn 14y ago

On the last point, one thing I've taken away from the HN karma system is that your votes are most highly correlated with the general traffic around a discussion, more than with anything specific to the comment. Posting almost anything decent on a story that sits on the front page for a day will get you double-digit upvotes, especially if it's an early comment. But posting something in an article that only briefly hits the front page will not get much attention. Come to think of it, that does transfer to both business and academia to some extent.

brudgers 14y ago
Are you suggesting that a knack for timing and an ability to deliver something that others value might be individual qualities which YC might wish to develop in potential applicants who participate on HN?
- mjn 14y ago
  I don't see it as very HN-specific. It's the exact same pattern you find at Reddit and Slashdot, so if YC is mainly attempting to cultivate that property, looking for users with the highest Reddit karma might be a good strategy (and they've proven themselves to a larger audience, probably more representative of average consumers). The negative way of looking at it is that it's most important just to be in the general vicinity of activity and say something with either broad appeal, or provocation. In academia this is becoming a common strategy with the rise of metrics. Find a hot area, publish a paper with a linkbaity title and prominent keyword placement, and wait for the citations to roll in. In business, it's the strategy of choosing your field of endeavor by picking the places where the most money is flowing around, and then just doing something average in that space.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    YC can structure HN to simulate market conditions. They cannot do that with Reddit.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  What you're describing is equally true of stand-up comedians as entrepreners and technical people.

zalzane 14y ago

>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system. This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it. The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful. Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?

petenixey 14y ago
I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement. Karma's value to the casual visitor is in communicating quality content that's been flagged by the community worker bees - the karma "waggle dance" :) From that perspective you want to be critical and only add weight to the "best things". However karma also plays a very significant role in guiding people as to how to modify their behaviour such that the community appreciates them. We all want to be liked by communities we identify with and karma is a powerful tool to see how we can "fit in". Karma is an incredibly powerful tool to communicate in a very discrete way to new community members how they can establish themselves. As the karma-moderator I find myself looking to give the community ways award karma wherever I can. I'm not worried about how insignificant the effort that it was rewarding; all I want to do is give people encouragement when they do something (anything) the community appreciates.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob. This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc). The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.

tikhonj 14y ago

This also depends on what your interests are. For example, my primary interests are in programming languages, functional programming, type theory and so on. My highest voted comments have mostly been fairly long ones in these topics. Moreover, most of them were pretty constructive: things like explaining how to generalize pattern-matching, how typeclasses are useful, what FRP is or even just how your editor can display Haskell syntax with Unicode. (It's like an awesome version of syntax highlighting.) Admittedly, my single highest-scoring post was a bit less constructive: a rant about Go. However, in my defense, it was a long rant with substantial details and examples. And, honestly, I'd be extremely happy if it saved some people from learning Go and got them to consider Haskell or OCaml instead.

dakimov 14y ago

Basically, be as mediocre and stereotypic as possible, conform to the crowd, please everyone, this is what you are talking about? Maybe, it's an inherent problem with the "karma" system. It encourages you to avoid saying what you really think unless you are a Mr. or Ms. Mediocrity. This gets even nastier considering that most people are narrow-minded and aggressive.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

brudgers 14y ago

I believe that your "Edit" hits the entire purpose of karma - encourage better writing. Karma for good posts. Karma for good submissions. What is sometimes a struggle is that better writing is not always what we wish it would be. Sometimes is well reasoned explanations. Sometimes it is passionate argument. And often, highly rated comments and articles become highly rated because of timing. Sometimes it is just showing up (80% of the time, Woody Allen may have said). It's satisfying to make a pitch perfect comment - even more so I find when it isn't snark or mean. I know what my best comments have been, and I know these are not the same as my highest rated. My best comments have been ones that I've cared about and some of those have even gone negative.

anthonyb 14y ago
I basically ignore karma these days. It doesn't encourage better writing, it encourages more off the cuff funny one liners. Here's an experiment of mine from a couple of months ago, on a duplicate news post: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=anthonyb+unflag&sortby=points+desc&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=anthon... Do I really deserve that 69 points of karma? Is that 20 or 30 or 69 times more valuable than other posts where I've spent a lot more effort? Perhaps this is where some of the 'snark' is coming from. In the race to get more karma, people are looking for the cheap throwaway one liner that everyone will snicker at and upvote.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Karma is probably more closely related to how popular your opinion is on a given subject in the hacker news community. As you said it does not really encourage better writing, while there is sometimes a correlation between a good post and many upvotes, especially on very technical subjects. Also, Karma on news submissions has become a race to be the first to publish the latest techcrunch news or related sites, so it's not all about comments or contents.

robryan 14y ago

It depends on the topic, lots of popular legal based threads have had a very in depth reply from grellas with a ton of upvotes. I think in that situation although not everyone would fully grasp the content they are upvoting in appreciation that someone who is an expert in the field has taken the time to explain and simplify the complexities of a legal case or argument.