
Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes. - andrewfelix
Both HN Articles and comments have been gradually slipping in quality. I think this is probably inescapable as more users with less discerning tastes and attitudes come on board.<p>However I think the slide towards a reddit style board can be slowed significantly by reducing the influence of new and less appreciated users. By giving long term HN users with high karma (ie. not me, but the people who made HN great) more up-vote power and newer members and those with lower karma less up-vote power.<p>The current system allows high karma users to down vote, but this power is nullified when everyone has the ability to up-vote. For example you could have one dubious article or comment upvoted 100 times by users with 0 karma.<p>I propose halving up-votes for those with low karma and doubling the up-votes for those with high karma. This way you retain the influence of original members, and you further incentivise new members to make meaningful comments and strive for higher karma.<p><i>EDIT: benologist makes a good point that high karma might just represent a lot of submissions and not quality posts. Perhaps then the up-voting could be tied to karma avg. This was you incentivise posting higher quality comments and articles.</i>
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benologist
High karma mostly just means you submit a lot of stuff. Age of account is a
meaningless metric as well.

I like the suggestion I saw weeks ago of just ditching submission karma. When
people have no incentive to automatically or manually dump everything
Ars/TC/etc publish then the quality of stories might go up.

Edit: found the suggestion, it was by Cletus:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788875>

~~~
andrewfelix
How about karma Avg. then?

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unimpressive
>How about karma Avg. then?

Step one: Make new account

Step two: Post Techcrunch or similar article guaranteed to hit the front page
of HN.

Step three: Use newfound insane karma average to upvote crap submissions.

Step four: ???

Step five: Profit.

I actually like "Remove submission karma.". That should stop the linkbait
articles from people who have to have their play money.

~~~
jaredsohn
I'm okay with removing submission karma. There are also a few other options
for reducing the influence of submission karma that we should also consider:

* Have a karma cap for submissions. It could, for example, only give one karma for every ten upvotes (rounded down to discourage people from posting many articles). There could also be a hard maximum.

* Reward less karma if more people submitted the link manually. This gives less karma for popular things such as Paul Graham essays, TechCrunch articles, etc. When other people submit an article, it should still reward the article itself with upvotes, but it would make sense to reward the poster less since it is likely the story would have been posted anyway.

These alternatives are better than removing submission karma in that they
still reward people for posting interesting content, but are worse in that
they make things a little more complicated.

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justjimmy
Here's an idea:

Have karma and voting tied together. Your Karma is basically how much votes
you get to give.

If someone makes a good post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma.
The person made the post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote
other posts.

We can limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way
they can vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality
articles/posts.

Now it works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too,
thus making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action
will cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without
thinking.

Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote positive
contribution and dissuade useless contributions.

The tricky part is balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons
votes/karma from the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes
into the system. Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10
votes each month. But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must
first contribute enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100
upvotes to your posts/contributions).

~~~
jaredsohn
I like this idea but I think it is also necessary to show "total karma
received", which is equivalent to what we think of as karma today. Otherwise,
people are incentivized to hoard their karma to boost their reputation.

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6ren
<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic> shows the frontpage using only upvotes
from older members. It's usually pretty similar.

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eof
Something I have thought about is giving more weight to rare-voters.

My HN karma is easily 50x the number of votes I have ever given, up or down.
But when I do vote, I _really mean it_.

This is somewhat a problem though if I never vote but happen to vote my
buddies post because he is my friend; so maybe it wouldn't work.

To your idea; instead of giving a 4-1 ratio from high-to-low voters; I would
propose something like like 0-10 with 10 points for those with the highest
karma, and 0 for those with the lowest.

~~~
samirahmed
To implement such an approach HN users should not be made aware of the fact
that more weighting is given to rare-voters.

Otherwise users will change the manner in which they vote, making frequent
voters want to vote less and discouraging participation

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paulsutter
Maybe the solution is to let each user choose how articles / comments are
ranked. A PHP programmer will just have different interests from someone who
has started three companies or who has written a petabyte sort.

This is all written in lisp right? Maybe advanced users could contribute
ranking schemes and people could try them out.

Separately: I'd love to see a ratio of points given to points received. And a
separate count of total downvotes.

~~~
aashu_dwivedi
People looking for specific interests , for example PHP / PYTHON would get a
better content at the corresponding subreddit on the reddit site.

~~~
paulsutter
Even within a given discussion on mongoDB for example, there are just
different levels of expertise with system internals.

For example: Upvotes and downvotes could flow through all the posts like a
pagerank. So people who like "mongodb good!" comments can see those, people
who like "mongodb bad!" comments can see those, and I can see posts that
objectively discuss the strengths and weaknesses of mongodb.

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apedley
Is this more trying to stop HN changing and keeping it the same rather than
letting it adapt with the times?

The more people that come to HN the more diverse the topics (within the
hackersphere). HN will bring up the most relevant to the majority of the users
(mostly).

Maybe the articles brought up today are what most of the users are looking
for, which is now what you aren't looking for.

Keeping with the old ways, keeps it old.

~~~
andrewfelix
This is about trying to stop HN becoming reddit or God forbid youtube. Where
there are some great comments and submissions coupled with an overwhelming sea
of bullshit. This is about trying to incentivise meaningful comments and
submissions.

I don't want to see HN get to the point where interesting posts and comments
get lost in a whirlpool of css tricks, poor attempts at humour and thinly
veiled trolling.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot stopping that from happening at the
moment except for the fragile karma system.

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Altaco
No. No no no no no.

Karma being valued is a major part of WHY reddit is so awful.

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r4dius
Or what about opening up down-votes to all users again, and then weighting the
value of down-votes (karma level) rather than up-votes.

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senthilnayagam
my wish upvotes and downvotes scored seperately

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voodoochilo
what about combining karma on new submissions with the karma on comments?

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jaredsohn
It is already combined. There is only one karma number per user. (You might be
thinking of Reddit where they are separate.)

