

Ask HN: Hide karma everywhere? - pushingbits

Ok, so I have been thinking. Scores have been removed from comments, but you can still see the scores of submissions, your own comments and your avg. karma. If it made sense to hide the comments scores, maybe it makes sense to hide karma everywhere?<p>It seems like scores used to serve three purposes. 1. Rank comments / submissions; 2. provide feedback; 3. provide a mild incentive to post.<p>1. You don't need to see the score for points to serve this purpose. You might argue that this is not working anymore anyway, but that should be another discussion.<p>2. Since you can't see other people's points anymore, the positive reinforcement is already gone, as you have nothing to compare yourself to (are 5 points on a comment great or merely average?), and the negative reinforcement could be replaced by some other metric (display avg. number of comments with a score less than one).<p>3. This might have worked well when you had a small number of people who made relatively good comments anyway, but as more and more people join, you will also tend to get more people who care too much about internet cred and who are in it only to watch their karma go up. Of course I'm sure there are people who make great comments "for the karma". Still, I would guess that people who care more about karma are more likely to be people who make sub par comments.<p>As active moderation doesn't seem to be in the cards, it's all about creating an environment that encourages good quality comments and commenters and / or discourages bad quality comments and commenters. Removing the karma game completely could be a step in the right direction in that respect.
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steventruong
I much rather have scores on comments put back and karma removed completely
from the system. Maybe I'm wrong or it's just me but karma just feels like an
ego thing. Even more so, I don't get why submitting a post adds to your karma
(not even sure if it affects the avg scoring or not for that and it doesn't
matter anyway, not the point).

I rather remove karma completely and have people be open to having discussions
without fear of their karma avg dropping and more so, I would love to have
scores put back on comments for an easier time to read what others thing is
worth their upvote.

