This must be how Douglas Adams felt when people would come up to him and ask why he'd chosen "forty-two". Okay, let me see what I can do with this one. You sco

This must be how Douglas Adams felt when people would come up to him and ask why he'd chosen "forty-two". Okay, let me see what I can do with this one. You score one karma assist when a given user upvotes your comment immediately before or after upvoting a comment higher up on the same branch. The idea is that you can help other comments rise in prominence by adding your comment to them, thereby increasing their value. Thus, if someone upvotes your comment above and upvotes this comment at the same time, I get a Karma Assist. Naturally, you can't Assist your own comment, because everyone knows that's a sin. But I worry that this definition still isn't arbitrary enough. You actually might be able to compute this with an algorithm, which ruins the humor value. If the jokey analogy to NBA assists is going to hold up, Karma Assists need to be both poorly defined and arbitrated by bored human minions with a serious conflict of interest: http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-scorekeeper http://deadspin.com/5345287/the-confessions-of-an-nba-scorek...