I've noticed (past week or so) that comments that are at -4 still have a downvote arrow. They can be downvoted, they remain at minus 4, and (to the best of my knowledge) the poster actually loses karma even though the cap is -4.
This has been an intentional change that happened at least a couple of months ago. The idea is to discourage smart-ass remarks by punishing them more harshly, but also to discourage piling onto a downvote frienzy by not displaying the extraordinarily low vote count.
I'm not convinced that works, since the post still goes lighter, so you can tell how badly it's been downvoted, but that's the intention.
To be honest I hadn't noticed a problem with too many smart-ass remarks before the change. Everyone makes poor decisions from time to time and punishing them more harshly seems unnecessary.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. If you give people a numerical rating most will feel compelled to improve their standing. Losing karma is negative feedback (hence punishment).
It doesn't matter that your HN karma score isn't going to get you laid[1], people generally care about anything they're scored on.
[1] If it did edw519 would probably be dead from exhaustion or at least severely chafed.
Just so long as you understand that it doesn't work this way for everyone.
I hate the notion of karma used by sites like HN and Reddit. It turns the content of the site into a popularity contest, specifically because the motivation you're talking about encourages people to do things that have crowd appeal. Conversely, when an active, respected community member -- like jrockway for example -- says something offbeat, controversial, or just different from the prevailing opinion of the audience, and then gets "punished" for it by this collective reduction of a totally worthless number ... to me, all that does is reflect badly on the community.
To be honest, I have a pretty low opinion of a lot of the HN community, and the karma system contributes to that.
I'm not sure how you can make this statement with a straight face. Name another site with tens of thousands of active users having this level of discussion without karma.
(the fact that you're not being downvoted for making such an egregiously incorrect statement is proof if it was needed that the groupthink is not so bad, btw)
Tens of thousands of users I don't know, but Lambda the Ultimate for example. Discussion on blog posts also generally has less groupthink.
Voting was intended as upvote means good comment and downvote means bad comment, but people use it as upvote means "I agree" and downvote means "I disagree". Not everyone of course, but a lot of people do. This problem is less severe on hacker news than on reddit, but on reddit more people keep posting regardless of downvotes whereas here they are banned from the site.
LtU has a decent community because it covers relatively esoteric stuff, and excludes a general audience by design. HN, on its worst days, is a glorified comments section for tech industry blogs.
I think you know what you gain from having high karma. If you didn't, I doubt you would have felt compelled to earn your ~18,000 karma over the past 3 years.
...I don't know what's gained from having high karma (seriously). Could you explain that?
I dunno that you could say that someone has "earned" something that's primarily the result of their spending some spare time in a community and usually behaving in a way that the community likes.
>>...I don't know what's gained from having high karma (seriously). Could you explain that.
On this site you gain preference by the ranking algorithm, for one thing. Your comments and votes hold more weight. Outside of that, many people believe the karma makes the man and not the other way around. It can be an instant way to determine whether someone making a statement is qualified to make that statement. Of course that isn't how it should be, but that is how the human brain works until you've trained it otherwise. I've seen people with 10k karma make an ass of themselves and people with 30 karma divulge great insight, but the image is still there.
I would say on Hacker News you do more or less earn your karma. Since this community doesn't take too kindly to smart ass comments you are forced to conform to a higher standard than you find on other communities that give their users karma.
It's not perfect, but I do believe if you have high karma you have earned it (on Hacker News).
OK, but none of that has any impact at all on anything outside of HN. (With the possible exception of edw519, who's got such a high amount of karma that it might be breaking the fourth wall and spilling over into the rest of his life.)
> Since this community doesn't take too kindly to smart ass comments you are forced to conform to a higher standard...
Assumptions in this statement:
1. Everyone always wants to make smart-ass comments.
2. Nobody wants to behave this way anyway.
3. Smart-ass comments are never rewarded here.
I don't think I agree with any of those. I behave here exactly the way I did on Reddit; I simply no longer spend any time on Reddit. Nor does the karma system here discourage me from saying anything or behaving in a particular way. At the most, I might withhold an opinion on something simply because I don't feel like it's worth defending. (I'm spending so much effort ranting about karma here because I'm hoping that maybe someone will read it later and consider doing something different in the next social whattathingamajig.)
Certainly your karma impacts what you do outside of HN if it draws people to contact you outside of HN, or compels them to take to interest in your projects.
I don't believe my statement made any of the assumptions you listed.
Not everyone wants to make smart-ass comments, but many do. This is more true with people outside our community (Redditers) than for people who have been part of this community for a while. Smart-ass comments are sometimes rewarded here and that is somewhat unfortunate. The general rule however is that they are not. You do not behave like your standard Redditer, and that might be why you no longer engage in discussion there.
Whether your parent's comment constitutes inappropriate objectification of women or instead your comment constitutes an insufficient sense of humor, that debate could fill volumes. Now is not the time for that.
Considering the relative rationality and aversion to groupthink that people on HN seem to have, this seems to me (although I don't have much experience with moderating online communities) like a generally bad idea. I would expect people to see that Post X has -Y points and desist because the poster doesn't deserve -(Y + 1) karma for the comment. Hiding this information from the downvoter makes him do something he might otherwise not do, and I would expect this effect to be far greater on a site like HN than the drive to "pile onto a downvote frenzy."
I don't know the exact details (or, this may be all there is to it), but, I've seen a few people mention that votes below -4 are still counted, but the total will never be shown anything lower. IIRC, someone compared it to the (in)famous orange dot experiment.
Which I don't know how effective that is. There are a lot of people who don't mind "topping them off" at 5, only to become the 30th person to down-vote them.
Yeah I assumed that the limit was -5 without thinking about it to much. Some people have put something stupid in really popular threads and lost a stack.
The comment you linked to would not have been downvoted particularly because people disagreed with it, but because it didn't really add anything to the discussion. A reply like that doesn't really produce good discussion, and a lot of people on Hacker News try to discourage that.
At the time there was lots of handwaving, but nobody was bringing forward the obvious, when somebody owes you north of six figures, you sue them. Not sure why that didn't contribute anything, but that's what most rational adults do in that situation. It certainly wasn't part of the thread until then.
In my experience, a two word response containing an obvious course of action that everybody is overlooking like that would have either been downvoted to -4+ or upvoted to 30. It's a crap shoot.
Not sure how suing somebody who owes you that kind of money requires a long exposition to explain. The subsequent comment asking for alternatives was upvoted into positive territory that same day it was posted, without adding anything else and with no responses in the form of alternatives.
It's not the downvotes per se that I mind. People can feel free to disagree that a lawsuit is a bad course of action when somebody owes you $126,000. I think they are wrong, but whatever. It's not like any of the 10 people who hit the little down arrow could be bothered to type "I disagree with this because...". But that people continued to downvote long after my suggestion hit -4 shows that allowing downvotes after hitting -4 doesn't work. At that point, I'm just being targeted. Particularly when essentially the same comments were untouched or upvoted. If the thread hadn't moved off the front page rather quickly I'm sure I would have taken more hits.
Okay HN community! I got it! I should have provided half a dozen words telling them to sue instead of 3! Clearly that's the community standard as the linked comments demonstrate.
I now realize I'm now edw519 or patio11, where every 3 word comment gets half a dozen upvotes. Perhaps I should put some numbers next to my handle?
"At the time there was lots of handwaving, but nobody was bringing forward the obvious, when somebody owes you north of six figures, you sue them. Not sure why that didn't contribute anything, but that's what most rational adults do in that situation. It certainly wasn't part of the thread until then."
I'm consistently amused at how people who get their comments downvoted complain about the downvoting by rephrasing the point they were trying to make in order to make it clearer and more articulate. I do it, too. The joke is that if the original post expressed your point as clearly as the complaint post, we wouldn't get downvoted in the first place.
Writing for human consumption is a frustrating and inexact task. You might sound like a complete asshole without meaning to. I, in particular, often have that problem.
Since there's a chance PG will look at this thread and my email has been ignored, if you or a mod could restore my _ck_ account I'd be grateful (and disable this one, I don't care about lost "karma").
I still have no idea why the _ck_ account was disabled in the first place.
My thoughts on 'karma' or simple up/down rating systems:
A few years ago, I discovered a site called Reddit. After awhile, I realized there were comments on the site, and began reading them. While a few added to my enjoyment and understanding of the articles, I have to admit that what really attracted me were the pun threads.
Well, I thought I would attempt this interesting variety of interaction. I began to post my thoughts on subjects. I was surprised to see that my well thought-out comments were getting downvoted. Sometimes quite strongly.
Hmm... I reexamined my arguments and how I conveyed them. I experimented with different ways of expressing myself. However, most of the time when I made a comment which I thought was a bit insightful, I would see negative karma.
Finally, I changed my approach. Instead of thinking about a subject and writing what I thought of it, I instead peppered the site with knee-jerk, humorous comments.
My greatest success, by the way, was a one-line "your mom" joke which earned me something like 270 karma for a couple of seconds' work.
I found the worst problem to be in the subreddits. As I quickly learned, subreddits are inhabited by people who want their views validated. Even correcting dangerous misconceptions around basic physics would get harsh downvotes. Meanwhile, comments which perpetuated the status quo of ignorance were celebrated.
Up/down community rating does not provide any sort of legitimacy to posters. It only provides popularity. As one who doesn't take political advice from movie stars (for example), I find it appalling that this system is spreading.
As for the specifics of downvoting repeatedly, this is simple lynch mob mentality. A -1 rating has just as much power to say, "we don't like the way you express yourself," as a -10 rating. The only thing that -10 adds is a reflection of groupthink and people venting angst.
I'm not convinced that works, since the post still goes lighter, so you can tell how badly it's been downvoted, but that's the intention.