
New protection against karma bombing, damage undone - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#4aug07
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pg
I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to
only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each
user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.

~~~
staunch
I think the grumps might just upvote something random to get points to use
against something they don't like. The result of upvoting something that's at
10 points is weaker than downvoting something at 1 point. Maybe take current
score into account.

Or possibly just put a limit on the number of downvotes you can do per
day/week. We don't need nearly as many downvote points as upvote points to get
good results. Viewing and not upvoting something is like half a downvote
anyway. Maybe if you reply when past your limit you can then also downvote if
you want.

~~~
mark-t
> Viewing and not upvoting something is like half a downvote anyway.

This statement depends a lot on your habits. I open up 5-10 links at a time
and then read through them all. I rarely remember to go back and upvote, and I
reserve that for _really_ good articles, anyway. And of course you can't say
anything about comments, since there's no telling whether somebody even reads
all the comments when he opens a page with comments on it.

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Alex3917
As long as we're having a meta-thread, is there any way to incorporate the
site traffic into the decay function. The problem currently is that if you
post something off-peak, a lot of time elapses with no one around to vote. It
sucks to finish writing a blog post at 7pm and have to wait until 11am the
next day to post it.

~~~
pg
That's the main way the current plan isn't optimal. Paul Buchheit suggested I
scale votes by recent activity, and I probably will do that.

~~~
Alex3917
It'll be interesting to see if this change would affect the content on Reddit
at all. Normally if you want to ride the aggregation train the ideal strategy
is to wait until you hit the top of news.yc before submitting to Reddit, and
then wait until you make the front page of Reddit before submitting to Digg.
If good stories start hitting the #1 spot on this site during nights or on the
weekends, it could potentially have some interesting ripple effects further up
the chain.

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mynameishere
Once you come up with a really, really good way to correlate karma with a
user's quality of posts/comments, maybe try to come up with a _purpose_ for
karma.

~~~
pg
The purpose of karma on any site like this (all the way back to slashdot) is
to motivate people by giving them a measure of what their peers think of their
contributions.

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mynameishere
I mean a purpose that would, for example, prevent reddit from turning into
digg.

~~~
pg
I actually have a plan for this. It's built into the current sw but not turned
on. It hasn't been needed so far, and may never be because of Startup News's
narrow focus.

If I reuse the code to make a general news site, as I've been thinking I
might, I'll certainly turn it on.

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Dauntless
I wasn't able to downvote since I made an account. But it has its benefits;
not being able to downvote or see your comments downvoted makes it a lot less
stressful experience.

~~~
pg
I should clarify: there has always been a karma threshold for downvoting.
Currently it's 20. Till you have that much karma you don't see downarrows
anyway.

~~~
Dauntless
Sounds fair.

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brianmckenzie
Why not let us see who has upvoted/downvoted our comments? It's frustrating
when someone downvotes without explanation, especially if it's not an
obviously stupid comment.

But all posters are not created equal - what if we could consider the source?
If some guy with -27 karma downvotes my comment I could care less. If it's
someone like Paul Buchheit, on the other hand, I have to consider the
possibility that my comment was really stupid.

~~~
palish
It's anonymous by design, not by side effect. It's the same reason no one
really knows if you voted for Bush or Kerry.

~~~
brianmckenzie
Hmmm...yeah, that makes sense. It keeps things from getting overly personal.

