

What makes karma valuable? - yters

I think its primary function is a commodity for bonding and shaping the group, i.e. like economics or information flowing on a network.
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mercurio
It's a reward mechanism. It's mere existence makes it valuable.. kind of like
fiat money :)

But seriously, on the micro scale, earning a single karma point feels good
because it means somebody appreciates what you said. On a macro level, it lets
you compete with other people, and serves the same purpose that high scores in
video games do. Humans respond very well to an abstract notion of wealth, and
humans are naturally competitive.

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davidw
I think it's more "valuable" on your 'micro' (per thread) scale.

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chengmi
I see karma in the sense of politics. In the case of Hacker News, each person
is given a vote on each of the submissions--essentially electing the best
stories to appear on the front page.

This is a direct democracy, which has some shortcomings, particularly in voter
apathy and the promotion of self-interests, where voters put their own needs
before the needs of the whole. As the population of a direct democracy grows,
it becomes increasingly difficult to accurately represent the will of the
people (successful direct democracies usually emphasize consensus over
majorities).

These problems are addressed in a representative democracy, where
representatives are elected to vote in place of the people, as in the case of
Congress or Parliament.

I believe that as online communities grow, voting systems begin to fall apart
because the votes cease to represent the will of the community as a whole (the
special interest groups take over the site). A common way website owners deal
with this problem is by bringing in moderators or by somehow weighing votes
based on some criteria, seniority or otherwise.

But I digress...

Karma is there to give people power over the direction of the community.
Without karma, you would have no control over what you see, much like state-
run media.

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bdfh42
It is simple feedback. It tells you that your contribution (however small or
infrequent) is valued by others.

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mechanical_fish
As a Cory Doctorow fundamentalist, I believe that my high karma score will
eventually allow me to own Disney World.

But it could be that it's just a crude mental hack that we substitute for all
the normal social signals we get when we socialize in person. We can't smile,
frown, applaud, backslap, suddenly remember a previous engagement, or cough
pointedly here. Even a deliberate change of subject is hard to pull off when
the posts appear in arbitrary order. All we can do is use karma.

~~~
yters
Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. People have to do this kind of value
exchange to form an effective group.

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pg
The people whose opinion it represents.

~~~
manvsmachine
I think it represents what both pg and esr have expressed at some point: that
good, or even great hackers, often don't recognize themselves as so until
being recognized as such by other good hacker. Karma allows us to get an idea
of how we fit on the scale and see what our strengths or weaknesses are. If
you make a post / statement and it doesn't get upmodded, you want to know why;
was your reasoning to shallow, is there something that contradicts / disproves
your view, etc.

That's why there's the effort to keep fluff posts out; it changes it from
being "hacker karma" to "interesting karma" at best and "amusing karma" at
worst.

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Flemlord
The more karma you have, the more likely you are to reincarnate into something
cool the next time 'round the wheel. Lots of karma=rock star. No karma=a
snail.

~~~
albertcardona
Something cool? You mean a hacker?

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Raphael
It's there to make me feel bad.

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trekker7
Shhh... I want to keep reading great articles.

