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The notion of sincerity and karma is rather apropos for me at the moment. Recently someone mentioned that they noticed a high-karma commenter had deleted some

by dfc 12y ago

The notion of sincerity and karma is rather apropos for me at the moment. Recently someone mentioned that they noticed a high-karma commenter had deleted some comments that were being downvoted and opined that this was a good way to game karma because it meant that they were refunded the negative karma when the comment was deleted. Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? As luck would have it elsewhere on HN I am hemorrhaging karma at the moment for expressing an unwelcome opinion. I am not ashamed of the content or the manner in which I expressed my opinion so I have no intention of deleting my comments. As far as I am concerned by clicking the reply button I am implicitly stating that my comment is sincere. It seems that HN could introduce an implicit sincere flag if commenters did not get a refund for deleting karma-negative comments.

jcr 12y ago
As far as I know, the karma lost through down-votes on a comment is permanently lost rather than returned/refunded when the comment is deleted. Even if I'm right, your point still stands, since deleting a down-voted comment would put an end to further down-votes, so it's possible that some may delete comments to save face/karma. Similar could be said for editing. Unpopular opinions are always tough situation. Part of the problem stems from "up" and "down" votes meaning different things in different contexts. For example, up-voting a submission is a way to say "thanks" for submitting it. This usage is problematic since the opposite of "thanks" really doesn't exist. The typical negation "No Thanks" is not strong enough, and "flag" is far too strong. For submissions, there is no down-vote. In contrast, votes on comments are often used differently, such as an up-vote being used to show "agreement", and a down-vote being used to show "disagreement". The contrasting usage of votes results in both user-centric context and submission/comment context influencing what each vote means.
dang 12y ago
> Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? No, it's false.

by dfc 12y ago

jcr 12y ago

As far as I know, the karma lost through down-votes on a comment is permanently lost rather than returned/refunded when the comment is deleted. Even if I'm right, your point still stands, since deleting a down-voted comment would put an end to further down-votes, so it's possible that some may delete comments to save face/karma. Similar could be said for editing. Unpopular opinions are always tough situation. Part of the problem stems from "up" and "down" votes meaning different things in different contexts. For example, up-voting a submission is a way to say "thanks" for submitting it. This usage is problematic since the opposite of "thanks" really doesn't exist. The typical negation "No Thanks" is not strong enough, and "flag" is far too strong. For submissions, there is no down-vote. In contrast, votes on comments are often used differently, such as an up-vote being used to show "agreement", and a down-vote being used to show "disagreement". The contrasting usage of votes results in both user-centric context and submission/comment context influencing what each vote means.

dang 12y ago

> Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? No, it's false.