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The whole idea of "Karma" is silly. It encourages conforming to majority views and rewards people who are talkative rather than insightful - often mutually excl
by nir 17y ago
The whole idea of "Karma" is silly. It encourages conforming to majority views and rewards people who are talkative rather than insightful - often mutually exclusive groups, since insight is gained by thinking & doing rather than posting comments.
I think HN would do well to drop karma scores altogether, making this script a non-issue to begin with.
- brk 17y agoWhile we're on the topic of suggestions that aren't likely to be implemented ;) I like to see the user name hidden on comments and submissions until after you vote and/or reply. Judge the content on the content alone, not on the author.
- comatose_kid 17y agoBut then people would upvote comments (or worse, decrease s/n by responding) just to find out who authored them.
- rincewind 17y agoI trust security advice from tptacek or cperciva more than from [name withheld until you vote]. Threads get really confusing when [name withheld until you vote] argues with himself all the time.
- adimit 17y agoHow about withholding the name still, but offering a way to 'opt-out' from voting. You don't see the name until you either vote up or opt out. After you've withheld your voice, you can't go vote again on that submission/comment.
- eru 17y ago> you either vote up or opt out How about voting down?
- Novash 17y agoYou can't vote down until you hit a certain karma threshold.
- eru 17y agoYes, I know. I just could not resist making the itemization complete.
- neoclassical 17y agoI oppose voting down. It encourages a lynch mob mentality. What helps instead is an ability to, Slashdot-like, tag posts with warnings: spam, stupid, irrelevant, "humor," etc.
- nir 17y agoThat's my point - some people got high karma by posting intelligent comments, but many others just got it by posting a lot and echoing popular views. So, karma score in itself is pretty useless, in my opinion.
- johnmw 17y agoThis is probably getting a tad too complicated but having a number of different 'upvote' icons (ala Slashdot) would be interesting. You could upvote someone for being funny, informative, insightful, and so on. If someone has a high karma for being funny in topics related to computer security, you probably wouldn't trust their security advice so much.
- brk 17y agoYour point about valuing an opinion more highly from a person who is known to be accurate on a subject is valid. In the arguments case, I think it's easy enough to follow an A/B conversation, even without names. In the first case though, it still seems that the majority of comments here are not so specialized as to require the posters identity to determine if the content is accurate enough or not. Ideally, if you could not judge the accuracy of the comment on your own you would leave it alone. There would be enough others that could judge it impartially that the comment itself would get voted up or down appropriately.
- apotheon 17y agoThere's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion. It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on. I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.
- pbhj 17y agoYou could simply name all respondents by their response position in the thread, first is person1 (hope that's not too limiting!): person1:yay person2:people here like intelligent comments person3:go to digg if you want to yay all the time person1:yay And have an option to reveal names and/or show them on the mouseover link for personX.
- Bleys 17y agoYou would just need to break out the gensyms to resolve the differentiation issue.
- calcnerd256 17y agoIf users can no longer rely upon their names being displayed, they will come up with alternate ways of identifying themselves. Forced anonymous has worked in some places in the past.
- Novash 17y agoI don't know why you were downvotted. You do have a point. If we hide the name of the user on the header, they will probably simply post their name on the post itself.
- jwr 17y agoI don't trust security advice from tptacek. First because we had a discussion and we clearly do not agree as to who can be trusted, but second (and more generally), I don't trust anyone who has enough time to gather lots of karma on HN. Most people have better things to do.
- jacquesm 17y agoIf you are not in a position to evaluate an argument about security you probably shouldn't be following the advice anyway.
- xuhu 17y ago> Threads get really confusing when [name withheld until you vote] argues with himself all the time. Randomly generated names, until you vote ?
- pjvandehaar 17y agoAn answer to the second would be a system pointing out people's replies to themselves.
- pg 17y agoIntriguing idea. Maybe I'll do something like that.
- scott_s 17y agoKeep in mind that this might have adverse affects on the community. I upvote/downvote sparingly, but after over a year of reading people's comments, I feel like I "know" certain people because I recognize trends in what they say.
- sachinag 17y agoThe issue is that respondents may start addressing their comments to nerf such a change. Instead of: "You're forgetting something", you may get: "tdavis, you're forgetting something."
- hughprime 17y agoI don't think that the upside (creating a marginally fairer karma system) would outweigh the downside (making the whole site a whole lot less readable).
- diN0bot 17y agowhat about this: make up random names for people. these names should be consistent for the entire discussion on this page across page views, but different for a different discussion. i've never been able to remember who someone is or what they do. the benefit of trusting A more on a security issue because A has proven himself to be a master of security issues...well, that's a tough problem. i'd rather see anonymous names, no karma and a security certificate. karma is useful to draw n00bs into the system--i found it pretty darn cool when i started out. now i don't care at all. after 200 points they should disappear: now you've earned yourself a real soul.
- calambrac 17y agoI disagree. There are people on here that I don't want to waste my time reading at all, they're more or less consistent trolls (who knows, maybe I'm one for some people). I may miss out on some accidentally or authentically insightful commentary now and then because I completely skip over comments by certain people, but there's enough insightful commnentary in the universe that I can live with it. Reputations are important.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- PebblesRox 17y agoHiding names should be optional, like "showdead." Then you can choose for yourself instead of getting stuck with a system you dislike.
- sp332 17y agoIt's really hard to follow threaded conversations without any kind of ID.
- jwecker 17y agoThis was mentioned by someone here a few years ago, but I still think it would be cool to see the karma/posts ratio for people. Just for kicks, not for voting (: To be perfectly honest I never even notice the names on comments. OK, not totally true, I notice pg and one or two other people that I know personally. I remember when hacker news started and pg would automatically get pretty much every member upvoting him (hence him not being in the leaders section- no one even comes close I assume).
- onreact-com 17y agoImagine this with politicians: Not knowing whether a speech was made by Obama or Cheney would greatly improve trust in politicians ;-)
- ilitirit 17y agoI'd prefer to see the number of karma points hidden, rather than the user name. The user names don't really interest me that much, and I tend to forget them very quickly.
- radu_floricica 17y agoOr just hide it and show it on mouse over. The only problem is that is makes conversations difficult to follow. Who answered this post? The OP? The grandparent? Somebody else? One solution is to display made-up ids, but they have to be easy to recognize. Some help would be if you mouse-over an id to show the name on all the posts of the same user.
- javanix 17y agoI'm not sure I agree with you. Karma as a measure of personal worth is silly, but as a way of cutting down on trolls it works pretty well. That number at the top of the screen is something that I'd bet the Reddit and TechCrunch commentors would care deeply about, and as such, it keeps them from dumbing down the discussion here too much. In any case, HN is by far the best self-moderated discussion forum I've ever seen, and I'd be leery of making any major change that might conceivably disrupt that.
- thras 17y agoI like Karma, because it means that established members don't have to worry too much about how any particular post will be received, and can present unpopular points of view without too much penalty.
- bendotc 17y agoWhy would established members "have to worry too much about how any particular post received" if HN didn't have karma? You say that karma allows established members to "present unpopular points of view without too much penalty" but how does karma's existence (that is, the total of all up-votes on all comments and features gated by that score) not encourage just the opposite? Also, why should we privilege established members' dissent more than outsiders'? It seems like outsiders might even have a better vantage point.
- thras 17y agoGood points. But not everyone cares about maximizing karma. For most people, it just happens. What karma does is allow people to find out that you aren't just a troll even if a particular comment is rated at -10.
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- erlanger 17y ago*upvotes*
- jobeirne 17y agoLike any compromise, it offers negative points as well as positive ones. I would argue that very often (at least in this community), posts with large karma are valuable, if not necessarily as valuable as the karma would indicate. Karma is a mechanism of convenience; that isn't to say it precludes users from browsing and enjoying non-karma'd posts.
- svjunkie 17y agoKarma isn't necessarily about conforming to majority views because (and I've especially practiced this at HN) it is completely reasonable to upvote a comment you disagree with. Of course, not everyone would agree with Voltaire, but I have seen enough civil disagreement within this community to believe that "Karma" at HN works the way it was supposed to. Moreover, insight is gained by thinking and doing, and those insights are often enriched by discussion with those who bring other perspectives to the table. By "rewarding" people who contribute to productive discussion, we help to encourage the HN community to enrich our existing insights.
- tokenadult 17y agoHN has a feature request thread, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 which I count on the curators to read regularly.
- scott_s 17y agoI don't see HN karma as a reward system, but a way to promote good, civil discussion.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- UpFromTheGut 17y agoI think karma can be very informative-- it gives me an idea of what the majority viewpoints are.
- billswift 17y agoKarma can be more courteous than having to tell someone he's got his head up his butt; just downvote him, if enough people agree he should get the hint.
- hc 17y agoor, you could man up and say something... isn't the one with his head up his ass precisely the one who needs more than "a hint"?
- hughprime 17y agoWhat if the karma system were kept, but people could only see their own karma score and not others'?
- zackattack 17y agosocial shame/reward is a more powerful force than intrinsic motivation to be good/bad
- tigerthink 17y ago>It encourages conforming to majority views and rewards people who are talkative rather than insightful - often mutually exclusive groups, since insight is gained by thinking & doing rather than posting comments. Erm, I always upmod comments that I consider insightful. I think the picture is more complicated than you make it out to be.
- jacquesm 17y agoKarma is a great tool, but mostly behind the scenes. Keep the up/down arrows, lose the points until after a vote has been made, keep the name. That way you get away from the 'group think' mode.
- neoclassical 17y agoIt's the "ad populum" fallacy in numeric form.