

Karma Hack - Encourage the creation of interesting content - webwright

I'm honestly not much of a karma-whore, so I'm not terribly motivated by it.<p>However, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to roll content creation into the karma score.<p>Example:  Paul Buchheit writes a lot of good stuff.  Other people submit it.  They get points.  However, if you could associate Paul's blog to his YC.News account, then you could have some of that karma attach itself to him.<p>Now, how to reliably "claim" a blog is a challenge.  And WTF you do with a site like the BBC, Wired, SFGate, etc.<p>for reference: (http://searchyc.com/top/domains_by_points)
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aneesh
On a related note, the community's voting patterns encourage the witty one-
line comments over the thoughtful 3-sentence comments. Look at any article,
and you'll see the type of comments this incentive produces.

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flyhighplato
It's hard to represent something subjective in a single number. This problem
isn't really solvable. Making the karma algorithm too complex could make it
even worse.

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yters
I think making someone's karma filter subjective could solve the problem. Then
it would also be hard to game the system, since you'd have to know how most
people filtered karma.

This filter could either be based on how people vote, or using karma and
something else as the criteria.

An example of the latter, I've thought the good comments would be those that
maximize length and karma. That means they are both substantive and well
written enough to hold people's attention. Plus, it's too long to be witty:)
This could be implemented entirely client side without the need to open up
voting data.

Finally, it'd fit great into the whole hacker mentality, since people could
pass around and hack the best filters.

(note: this idea has been said by many others, I'm merely trying to perpetuate
the meme)

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codeLullaby
This seems to question the whole purpose of karma. When a user upvote a story,
isn't he saying "Thanks for sharing this with the community.I want more people
to see this" rather than "i agree with the content of this article"?

Karma encourages users to participate in the sharing activity.Its purpose is
not to thank the content creator, but the person who took time to share it.

[Vote ≠ Karma]

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webwright
I would say that an upvote is saying:

"This is good content. I'm glad you submitted it, I'm glad the writer wrote
it, and I'm glad I read it."

Upvotes are NOT saying "I agree with this" (I don't think).

The current karma encourages scouring the web for good content for the
community. It does not reward creating of good content for the community... I
suppose a person could submit their own stuff if they cared that much.

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vlad
There are more than two reasons a user might upvote another user's post.

Some of the many situations one might click the up arrow:

\- to thank others for posting to one's thread in order to create a positive
feedback loop

\- to increase visibility of what a user wrote or submitted

\- to display agreement with points made in the submission

\- to "save" the submission for future reference, as users can track what
they've upvoted in the past

\- to promote a specific idea or ideology

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ivankirigin
Tipjoy has a system of associating sites with users. Manually finding that
someone owns a site is easy. Automatic authentication involves a detectable
change in the site.

For example, if PG wrote a crawler to find HackerNews:ivankirigin on my blog,
it would be known that I own that blog (just the subdomain though, not all of
blogspot.com).

The vast majority of content on HackerNews is created by non-hackernews
readers. They aren't going to do anything like this.

So while such a system would be useful, it would be practically difficult to
make a real impact.

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mattmaroon
Ha, I can't imagine what my karma would be if I got points for the articles I
submitted that others posted. But I guess if I cared, I would just post them
myself.

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Kaizyn
The 'problem' of claiming site/post ownership could be solved with public key
cryptography. However, so far, no one's bothered to do so.

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nreece
>> how to reliably "claim" a blog is a challenge

OpenID

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martianpenguin
Does the karma really do anything? Or is there a complicated algorithm that
sorts comments based on people's karma?

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aneesh
I'm pretty sure the sorting of comments has nothing to do with karma of the
poster, just the votes on that particular comment, and how old it is - similar
to how stories are ranked on the front page.

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martianpenguin
If that's the case, then why do people even have a karma score? The karma
should just be a score for each comment/article.

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webwright
It's making a game out of it, which gets a small subset of users maniacal
about their Karma score and thus submitting tons of good content. PG = Crafty
Devil.

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martianpenguin
The karma score of each person should show up next to people's names then.
It's kinda hidden away right now.

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toffer
This sounds like a good idea for a greasemonkey script.

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freakball
[http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=reddit&sort=inst...](http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=reddit&sort=installs)

