
Ask HN: Wouldn't it make sense to calculate karma on comments, not submissions? - Ultramanoid
It seems irrelevant and unrelated to a specific user that an article that is picked at random and heavily discussed gives the submitter a large number of karma points while the submitters not &#x27;chosen&#x27; but who have contributed in equal measure ( and often earlier than the one upvoted ) receive nothing.<p>One would think, this being a community, upvoted comments would be a much more useful measure for karma, possibly the only one needed ?
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jstewartmobile
Completely disagree. The articles are the most valuable part of the site.

Regardless of personality or politics, most can rightly agree that things like
" _Fancy Euclid 's “Elements” in TeX_" or " _Text rendering using multi
channel signed distance fields_ " are noteworthy accomplishments.

What some asshole thinks about those things, and what a bunch of other
assholes think about his thinking, are neither here nor there--this comment
included.

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Ultramanoid
That's not my point. Of course articles are the most valuable part.

But how does it make sense to give 400 points to a submitter out of 5 who
posted the same thing ? And often to an article which may not be neither the
first, nor the best about the issue. That's what I mean by entirely random.

Furthermore, without threads and comments HN would just be another link
aggregator from some relatively fixed sources.

And you prove my point about comments mentioning a-holes, in that useless ones
would be downvoted while useful or informative ones would be upvoted, and
quite rightly bestow karma and benefits to contributors deserving it. That
would make sense. You wouldn't see actual a-holes, they'd be downvoted to
oblivion.

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jstewartmobile
Giving the big points to submitters encourages people to keep submitting.
Maybe one of the other five will get lucky next time.

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Ultramanoid
I upvote _every_ submission of the same article that I find interesting or
useful, but it gets ridiculous after a while. And not to do so seems utterly
wrong from my point of view, since points are given to submitters, and
receiving points grants them benefits.

Maybe if HN consistently registered the first submitted link and marked all
others as dupes automatically. Even so, still seems a flawed reward system.

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masonic

      I upvote every submission of the same article that I find interesting
    

... then you are intentionally rewarding submitters of dupes?

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Ultramanoid
So I should vote only the first submitter and to do so hunt down all the
instances of the article posted before, to find out who was the first ? And
that'd be the value in karma -- who submits first ? Sure, it'd make at least
more sense than it does now, which is randomly giving hundreds of karma points
to anyone.

Still wrong in my view, and worth giving more value to comments. I've already
commented anyway, not sure why HN does not automatically register the first
time a link is submitted and redirect the rest to the first one.

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sytelus
That would depend on how karma is used, right? I'm not sure if it is well
known how various HN algorithms depend on karma.

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chupa-chups
I thought the point of HN is to share intellectually interesting stories and
points of view, with karma etc. just being a (maybe) necessary by-product.

I feel your proposition would not affect this goal in a good way.

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Ultramanoid
What is the point of karma then ( which is another and perfectly valid
question -- why not just get rid of it... ), and why it grants benefits as it
goes up when it is ( seemingly ) given entirely at random ?

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greenyoda
To get karma, you need to have had some level of participation in the
community (posting useful articles or making useful comments).

By putting a karma threshold on actions like flagging or downvoting, HN
ensures that these actions can't be done by someone who has just created a
throwaway account to harass people.

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donttreadonwe
Karma is given to reward good contributions. There is perhaps an optimal
scaling of each type of upvote, but without further study, a 1:1 ratio seems
pretty reasonable.

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dang
Upvoted comments do get karma, just as upvoted stories do.

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Ultramanoid
Upvoted comments are directly related to the user's comments, and thus the
user, so that makes sense. Articles are not related to the user* posting them.
It's basically random unless I'm missing something.

Like I said, I upvote all submitters of the same article because otherwise it
seems wrong given how karma works now. But we shouldn't have to do that.

Edit : * With the exception of Ask HN or Show HN, I suppose. But the vast
majority of links are from external sites and submitted several times by
different users.

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dang
Stories are the life blood of HN. Without stories, no comments, and no Hacker
News. So it doesn't make sense to reward them less.

I agree that there's an issue with randomness about which submission of an
article gets the karma. It's on our list to do something about that. But it
does even out in the long run for anyone who submits many good stories. And I
don't think most HN users care about karma too much.

