

Ask YC: Do you care about Karma? - kashif

Since the last influx of users, I have been thinking about social aggregation systems such as news.YC.
And, to put it in a nutshell, I believe that for communities such as nYC which are, not mainstream, comparatively close knit and somewhat homogeneous, it is possible to improve the quality of the submissions and comments if we removed individual karma altogether but kept the voting system for submissions and comments intact.<p>What do you think?
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jrockway
I care. Reddit was destroyed by trolls and joke accounts. They get downmodded
quickly, but they keep coming back and spamming every article. Even though
comments are the main point of Reddit, you get no credit for posting good ones
and no penalty for posting spam.

Slashdot had the right idea when you were limited to one post a day (or
whatever) when your karma got to -10. If you can't write content that other
people enjoy, you need to leave or adjust your attitude. Karma is a way of
making people feel bad enough to go away :)

The more people we can encourage to stay on /b/, the better... 'cause I really
don't care to read that drivel, but I do care to read what people think about
programming-related things.

~~~
kashif
I am sorry, I don't understand your point on how Karma relates to spammers
going away and 'joke' accounts not being created, especially if they spammers
kept coming back anyway.

~~~
icey
My assumption is that reddit only really cares about keeping traffic up, while
PG only cares about keeping quality up.

Having karma today allows PG to make changes tomorrow if he needed to take
care of quality issues.

~~~
kashif
Okay, thanks. Much clearer :)

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ph0rque
I had a karma of ~350 until the software glitch at the beginning of the month.
At first, I cared, but then I realized that it's not important in the grand
scheme of things. However, I would like to get my #CBDDFF top bar back, and
have the down arrows available again. Otherwise, it's no big deal :~).

~~~
yters
Yeah, same reasoning with me. All I wanted was to change the top bar color.
Then I started getting close to the leader board and I suddenly need to grind
points:D Vote me down to save my soul from the karma!

\- EDIT -

I want to add that my most recent submission that did get me a lot of karma
was not posted for the sake of karma. I genuinely am curious and I appreciate
all the responses.

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gaika
Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric:

For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this
community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or
not.

~~~
concealed
The principal effect of karma here is not how it helps you judge your fit, but
how it actively shapes the community/content. This effect was clearly visible
on reddit as it was realized that the more sensational content was vastly more
promoted in the reddit karma system.

So my question:

What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering
strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery site] good enough? Would
the theoretically perfect ordering offer much more value than current systems?

~~~
gaika
Take a look at my startup, we're trying to push a different system for ranking
stuff. I personally think there's a lot more value in it. But sometimes people
prefer simple algorithms that are easier to understand, there's value in it
too.

~~~
dreish
I like how you automatically assign a guest ID so visitors can try out the
customization features right away, and think, "Hell, I'm halfway to joining --
might as well go the rest of the way now." The same thing could have been done
invisibly with a cookie, but then the psychological hook wouldn't be there.

That's a very clever detail.

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hollywoodcole
No I don't. I just tell everyone how I feel and when I need to top up on Karma
I just post a pg related article...>:)

~~~
xenoterracide
he said pg everyone +1 for him.

~~~
xenoterracide
awe come on... it's a joke.

~~~
concealed
It's not funny when it's true:)

~~~
xenoterracide
no. that's why it IS funny, 'cause it's true.

It's sad too, though.

If pg says anything he gets at least 50 points for being pg. The rest is
because pg is actually smart and doesn't usually say dumb unthoughtful things.

~~~
brlewis
pg's median comment score is 4:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166110>

More people read pg's comments, so he does get more upvotes than the same
words would if coming from someone else. However, to say that you can mention
pg in a comment to get more votes is neither true nor particularly funny.

~~~
xenoterracide
wouldn't mode or average be more useful?

~~~
brlewis
For most questions I think average would be more useful. For the question of
whether people upvote pg thoughtlessly or not, median is useful. If more than
half of pg's comments end up with a score of 4 or less, then we can conclude
that his comments that end up with 50 or more points are a select subset.

~~~
kashif
Submission scores might be a statistically different distribution then comment
scores. Also while median is better than mean, it may or may not be better
than mode - difficult to tell without looking at the shape of the
distribution.

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plinkplonk
I don't care about Karma.

Mostly.

One day I noticed that I had about 180 karma and decided to try for 250 so I
could change the colour of the Navbar. After clearing 250 (and changing the
color to a nice soothing green vs the default orange), I find I don't really
care about Karma.

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. - Napoleon

~~~
kashif
Perhaps, these customization freebies only become available at various karma
levels because the intent is to get a user to increase karma.If we aren't
chasing karma then this stuff can just become available as features.

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brk
I think that people spend a LOT of time obsessing over karma and
rankings/ratings.

This includes not only obsession with gaining karma, but obsession with how to
better measure, display or distribute/earn karma points.

What I would personally prefer to see is someone present a valid, (semi)tested
proposal for a better system. There have been a lot of threads withe what I
personally consider to be vague half-suggestions for "improvement" that don't
really articulate how the proposal will make news:YC cumulatively "better".

When I'm reading the site or submitting comments or linking I don't really
find myself giving a lot of merit to the overall rankings. I'm just as likely
to add a comment to a story with a ranking of 100 as I am to a story ranked 1,
provided the story itself interests me.

Perhaps your argument would be more persuasive if you applied it to some
submissions or comments showing how it would affect those items for the
overall betterment of the site.

~~~
kashif
Alas, I do not have the necessary resources.

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walterk
User-wise, I'm more interested in a user's average karma per post than their
total karma.

Post-wise, I have some gripes with the way karma works, in that your high-
value comment can easily go ignored because it starts off at the bottom of a
well-populated thread. Which, for karma-gamers, means it makes more sense to
reply to a comment with high karma to increase the visibility of your comment
rather than starting a new comment thread. And it also means that your average
karma per post doesn't necessarily reflect your average value per post.

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apgwoz
I'd love if social news were more like an RPG where you could "level up" to
get more features, customizations and other things I can't think of. Last I
knew, users with 250 karma were allowed to change the color of the nav bar at
the top.

~~~
kashif
I would personally play an RPG instead - if I was looking for such excitement.
From nYC I want the best submissions. :)

~~~
apgwoz
But, the best submissions would still exist. People would still vote for the
best things. There would just be more rewards for those who submitted them.

~~~
kashif
Yes, that is indeed the current hypothesis. I am suggesting an alternate one
might improve the quality of the submissions even more. And, to test this new
hypothesis we must necessarily discard individual karma.

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andr
I'm only happy when my karma reaches a certain significant number. Like 314 or
411.

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Jesin
No, I don't like the karma system. It has too much potential to discourage
dissent. I like the upvote/downvote system for comments and stories, but
keeping track of karma turns it into a punishment/reward system.

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TrevorJ
No, I think the added impetus to ad value to a conversation that karma
generates for some is very helpful in keeping the signal-to-noise ratio at a
decent level. Karma certainly doesn't HURT in regards to this and it has the
ancillary benefit of quantifying, to some extent the reputation of a given
contributor, which, for new users is very useful when it comes to
understanding who to listen to.

~~~
kashif
Okay, but I am not sure how credible such a quantification is. Perhaps an
extremely 'credible' contributor posts quality stuff but very rarely. How
likely is it that I miss his submission if I was to look at karma as a measure
of credibility. My point is that karma equates more to participation than
substance - it is possible to have both.

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xenoterracide
I like it. But I think the amount of 'karma' that it takes to get on the feed
should be raised to 5. There is way too much feed traffic.

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mixmax
I would be lying if I said I didn't.

But I care more for a good conversation.

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Raphael
<http://vortices.appjet.net> has a direct vote up/down on users as opposed to
cumulative karma.

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abstractwater
All I care about is reading great stuff to build great products.

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Goladus
I care some, but not as much as I once did.

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nazgulnarsil
human beings will always care about a number next to their name.

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fairramone
Earning karma points is not important to me. I could honestly care less.

However, that being said, I am more a "consumer" of this site than a "poster."
I am not trying to be heard, trusted, or accepted by anyone here.

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cmars232
I think karma is a one-dimensional useless metric, and the only reason it
seems to have some value is due to the initial homogeneity of a social news
site's user community.

I didn't know hacker news added silly features based on karma. How pathetic.

