

Ask YC: Why not charge for downvotes? - raganwald

<i>Please don't downvote comments that are only mildly mistaken or disagreeable to scores as low as -10. That kind of score should only be for spams and trolls.</i><p>Why not charge for downvotes? Make downvoting cost a tiny sliver of karma. Or perhaps make it a statistical model: with every downvote, there is a small chance you will lose 1 karma point.<p>People who strongly disagree with something will still downvote, but if something you hate is already -5, why pile on? You'll save your downvotes for things closer to zero.
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Mystalic
Then there's no incentive to downvote at all. I know I'll stop downvoting (and
I rarely do it) to protect my Karma. You're not trying to decrease downvoting,
you're trying to have downvoting occur for the right reasons. Dismal idea.

At least you tried, though.

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cconstantine
Really? With 200+ karma you wouldn't be willing to knock someone down every
once in awhile... ya know, take one for the team?

I'm below 50 karma atm. and I think it might be worth it once in awhile. I'd
rather have this place be a good community than gobble up karma. All it takes
is for a small percentage of suckers like me to knock down the truly awful
posts into obscurity.

I'm not even sure if I like people knowing exactly what causes karma to move.
Allowing people to know the rules of the game invites people to 'game' the
system for more points. Is the point of the site to get lots of karma, or to
build a worthwhile community?

At any rate. I wouldn't say it's a dismal idea.

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raganwald
_Really? With 200+ karma you wouldn't be willing to knock someone down every
once in awhile... ya know, take one for the team?_

If certain things cost karma, karma becomes currency. You earn it in order to
spend it on stuff you want to do. Like downvoting.

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Mystalic
I personally don't want to see Karma become currency. I'm part of a message
board that does something like that, and its quality of posters has dropped
over the years.

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cconstantine
Yeah, there's something about karma that makes people go crazy. Maybe it has
something to do with people wanting validation. I don't get it.

I know pg uses this place as a kind of 'extended interview' for YC, and I"m
guessing he uses karma when evaluating someone. If karma really does corrupt
perhaps it'd be best to hide it from users? I don't really have an answer. I'm
simply not convinced this idea of costing karma to down vote someone is a
_bad_ idea.

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babul
What is the obsession with karma? Should we not up-vote the things we like and
down-vote those we don't without having to worry about karma? Is it not
supposed to be a measure of the value we find in things rather than with these
political connotations?

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syntaxfree
Votes should be traded in between users for money. Micropayments aren't really
necessary if you're in for the mid-run, as Adsense et al. prove.

