
Ask HN: What was the first site to use “karma” voting? - gitgud
Some of the best sites on the internet use the concept of crowd-sourced rating of content and comments by&#x2F;from the users. It probably doesn&#x27;t matter anymore, but I&#x27;m interested to know who came up with the idea? Or who did it first?<p>- Hacker News<p>- Reddit<p>- Stack Exchange<p>- Imgur<p>- Facebook<p>- Myspace
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cmdrtaco
I don’t think slashdot was firs to use crowd sourced rating, but I am not
aware of others to have an actual functioning system at a scale of 10s of
thousands in that era.

And to be fair, everything2 used the term karma before slashdot. We had the
concept of karma, but it was called like modtotal or something innocuous. Nate
was working on e2 and we were discussing ideas and I realized the term was way
more clear so I did the UPDATE TABLE that day. 98 maybe?

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acheron
(+1, Informative)

Thanks for the clarification!

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dpeck
As others have said Slashdot was very early if not the first. The way they did
moderation, which is very different from basically everyone else, and still
unique and interesting.

CmdrTaco did a great writeup on it back in 1999
[https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml](https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml)

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dasmoth
Among the lineage of web comment sites I'm familiar with, I'm pretty certain
it was Slashdot. They definitely had it in 1999. Might have been 1998.

It definitely wasn't Digg. According to Wikipedia, that wasn't even founded
until 2004.

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acheron
I don’t remember it before Slashdot either, and the founders sometimes talked
about it as if it were their own innovation. Not sure if there was any “prior
art” they were working from or not.

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zhte415
Not only did Slashdot do karma early or the first in it's regular form and
with quite a bit more finesse than most simple up-vote-down-vote, I'm pretty
sure they're the very first with automatically delegated meta-moderation:

Given your metrics on karma, visits, etc, to decide whether a rating was fair
or not. Again, like moderation, not a permanent role, limited to meta-modding
around 5 comments. That was a lot of fun as rated comments tended to be great
or awful, the great ones often in an article I hadn't clicked so get to read
through something new, and the awful ones quite amusing, Slashdot did have a
large subset of trolls that were very smart, sarcastic and scathing.

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bsvalley
I think you forgot Digg, the first one that blew up and made karma voting
popular. It was not the first one to use karma though, like google wasn't the
1st search engine. But before google a lot of folks didn't even know about
search engines... Most concepts on the Web existed way before the Internet
anyway.

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rando444
Digg was just a copy of Fark with a better UI.

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tCfD
Slashdot, including the first time 'karma' was associated with digital
influence afaik. Meta moderation and a cap on influence ranking was and still
is the Right Way to constrain sunset score-whoring feedback loops.

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jki275
Probably slashdot. Certainly none of the ones you listed.

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techbio
Interesting survivor bias represented here. Except for MySpace, these are only
extant sites. How many karma-implementing sites have vanished?

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fredsanford
Slashdot is the first "big" site I can remember...

But in 1996 or so there were a few gaming sites whose names I can't rememeber
who had a sort of negative karma... I remember it being described as a
"douchiness factor" a couple of times...

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jki275
I think the concept of shadowbanning may have existed before slashdot. I seem
to remember reading about it in the mid to late 90s on slashdot actually.

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ohithereyou
Distributed shadowbanning was implemented on Usenet with killfiles.

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tCfD
Don't forget the moose! cm.org

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mr_gibbins
[https://www.b3ta.com](https://www.b3ta.com) have been doing it for around 20
years.

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brandoncordell
I'm going to say Slashdot as well.

Did Myspace have karma style voting? I don't really remember that.

Also Imgur was BUILT to be an image hosting service for Reddit. Out of the
ones on your list it's the youngest service so it definitely wouldn't have
been the first in pretty much anything.

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jobigoud
Worth1000 photoshop contests site also had karma back in 2001. It was used to
ensure fairness in voting and gave more voting power.

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vishalsharma
stumbleupon can also be considered in this list

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daniel-s
I'm guessing digg.

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zirkonit
Man, I feel old when Imgur, a yesterday's establishment from my point of view,
can be considered a ’first‘ of anything.

While I also believe Slashdot to be the first one (it certainly is the first
one to use the _term_ ’karma‘), some two other early communities to check for
prior art are Kuro5hin and Advogato.

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tCfD
Kuro5hin was built by Rusty on slashdot's codebase so I don't think it could
have been prior

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jki275
Oh man I haven't heard of Kuro5hin in years. I actually deleted my account
there when I got doxed years ago.

