

Ask YC: Voting Karma - tel

My view of Karma is similar to my view of money: it's an artificial measure of the value you add to this site.<p>Most of my Karma comes from comments because I honestly take a pretty passive role here, taking in and commenting instead of actively adding nodes; however, I have an interesting habit. Whenever I write a comment, before I submit, I double check to see what value I'm really adding. If it's not pretty significant — if my comment is pretty much just agreement with something someone said with little additional information — I drop it and just upmod. It's a small effort to try to bring up the signal-to-noise ratio recognizing that even well meaning comments can be be noisy.<p>The part I want to call attention to is that, to me, it seems like you're still adding value when you upmod. It's far less than a full comment or submission, but you're calling attention to signal instead of noise.<p>My suggestion is that Karma could be incremented based on some fraction of the number of upmods that occur on an article you upmodded after you did so. This rewards the people who read articles (especially those on the new page) and vote so as to bring attention to something interesting.<p>Sound interesting?
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icky
The naive implementation would create an incentive to go to the "new" page and
indiscriminately upvote everything.

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marcus
The solution is to have a karma cost for voting on a submission/comment that
isn't upvoted enough (for example doesn't make the 40th percentile) or to
finally add downmod for submissions and make you pay for supporting something
the community rejects.

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tel
I see this as being a pretty good way of doing this, too. _Uncertain_ stories,
stories with little Karma, are riskier business and are therefore more
expensive to support, but if they're good stories the payoff can be lucrative
when large parts of the community agree.

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pg
I've considered doing something like that.

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kingnothing
I thought I heard somewhere that your vote gets more "powerful" if you were
one of the early voters on a story that garnishes a significant number of
votes. Was I mistaken?

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Alex3917
I think the old bellwether award on Reddit somehow fed into the recommendation
system. I'm pretty sure that stuff isn't turned on here yet though.

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tim2
> My suggestion is that Karma could be incremented based on some fraction of
> the number of upmods that occur on an article you upmodded after you did so.

Yes, I'm working with a similar scheme on my site. This rewards people for
predicting what will be popular and provides a big incentive to check out the
new content.

The basic system is something like a stock market (that's how I initially
visualized it). It costs zero to vote on something but if it goes negative
then you lose points, positive then you gain. Like "icky" says here, this
approach would have some vulnerabilities here since content is rarely voted
down (which is good.)

Ultimately, the closer the karma number correlates with how useful the user is
being, the more benefit the community will receive through some properties of
game mechanics. Right now, that correlation isn't very high.

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greendestiny
Any site like this is designed so that upvoted content is seen by a much
larger number of people than down voted content (which is, after all, pretty
much the point). So you're going to get a lot more upvotes than downvotes,
making rampant upvoting still strategically sound. You could weight negative
positions more than positive ones, or you could also have a buy in cost. Buy
in cost does provide a disincentive to voting which probably isn't desirable.

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tel
Disincentives to voting give more abstract _value_ to an upmod. Right now the
only thing that gives an upmod value is that you can only upmod a story once.

Without some sort of constraint the only thing keeping people from upmodding
continuously and rampantly is... RSI!

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greendestiny
We're still talking about a single upvote per article. Its just that if you
upvote every new article you'd end up ahead of the game whilst adding nothing
of value.

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tel
Bingo, I was being hyperbolic there.

The core idea is that upmods and downmods need to embody some sense of value.
Without a buy-in cost, the only contributing source of value is 1-vote-per-
story exclusivity. Without a buy-in cost, nothing is stopping me (edit: _or
someone else_ , hah. I don't mean to implicate myself for the sake of
rhetoric) from getting a bot together to upmod every single story essentially
nullifying the benefit of my vote and still maximizing the return.

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michjeanty
We shouldn't write base on karma, we should write because we have something
valuable to say.

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mhb
But karma tells you whether what you wrote is valuable here.

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ldambra
I posted 3 suggestions yesterday that went unoticed :
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133618>

The 3rd one concerns the karma system : makes a quota of free comments each
day then the additionnal ones cost some karma to post. Sometimes your silence
has a greater value than a new comment.

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huhtenberg
Here's an idea. Please bear with me for a moment, I'll explain how it's
related to the karma.

The system could group users based on their voting patterns and account for
these grouping when computing a point score of the submission _for specific
user_. For example, if A, B and C are voting up and down same articles, then
if A votes something up, this should mark it up in B's and C's view in some
fashion.

It is a form of a dynamic interest profiling, which should increase _per-user_
quality of the top articles. This way karma can be an indication of how
compatible you are with a general population .. though it wouldn't be _karma_
strictly speaking.

Thoughts ?

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jmtulloss
I agree. I personally don't really want to listen to people that care
immensely about their karma scores.

I think an exponential decay on how much karma you get based on upmods per
second would be sufficient to avoid people rampantly upmodding. It takes time
to read an article and its comments, and it seems like measuring that would be
an effective way of preventing rampant abuse.

Of course, people could just write scripts then to upmod all the time once
they figured out the optimal delay. Then there would be an entirely different
form of karma inflation to fight. Like spam, it seems to be a never ending
battle.

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urlwolf
I'm new here, but it seems this site is less about karma-whoring that digg and
reddit.

In any case... is it that difficult to reverse-engineering the points system?
For those who care...

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jmtulloss
It is much better than digg or reddit, in my limited experience. Karma
mongering still happens though, and it will probably increase with time as
more users are added unless karma mongering is carefully considered in the
design.

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dfranke
I think the vote-weighting system is a better solution to the same problem,
but PG hasn't turned it on (nor completely implemented it, as of arc2).

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ericb
I have a theory that drive-by modders who only read short posts cause one-
liners to out-karma thoughtful posts. Without seeing the data, it's hard to
know, but I'm wondering if a penalty for that voting pattern would be
worthwhile. The odds of learning something in a 2 word post that justifies my
time here seem lower, comparatively.

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manny
Sounds like an interesting idea, but what is to stop someone from just
upmodding every comment in a thread?

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martianpenguin
That could be solved by using a suggestion from another thread. Basically you
have to spend some karma to give karma out. And once you upmod one thing, it
will cost more to upmod something else soon after that. This system might have
to be seperate from the karma, but you could pay karma to get points in the
other system. It would definitely need to be refined.

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huhtenberg
This is an interesting idea. It's a variation of intelligent betting. However
it seems that mods with mainstream interests will end up with huge karmas,
while those interested in more quirky subjects will not get any.

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danw
You could let people bet karma on stories on the new page...

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earle
yeah that's definitely gameable but i think there's some merit in your
thoughts -- it certainly follows a better outline of what a meme is all about.

