Is karma for people even useful? Personally I rarely ever look at a person's profile, and if I do, I'll probably click on their "submissions" overview anyway.
Therefore for me, points on messages would be sufficient.
That way it would not be possible to frustrate users by depleting their karma (second time I witness this on news.yc, last time it was juwo).
I've found it relatively useful as feedback. It's sort of fun to see which posts get points, which don't, and which get tased.
If a solution to problem is necessary, I would first suggest scrambling the order of the leader board and hiding the Karma. At least, hide the Karma from the leader board listing itself. That would preserve recognition for the top contributors but there'd be less competition for the #1 spot.
Oh, and I like being able to downmod a post that was stealth-edited after I made a response for the sole purpose of saving face at my expense.
i'm against downmodding. i wrote here about a relative popularity system before; i'm all for relative-everything.
you don't need to downmod; you just need to be relatively worse. what happens to new users you ask? that's dealt with by another method; sticks out tongue.
but i think downmodding looks like something tacked on as an afterthought, being an opposite of "upmodding." when you're broke, you don't have money. when you're in debt, you still don't have money. if some comment is modded -3, it's bad. -50 is bad too. but you don't really care that one is 47 more bad than the other. while there is a case for, say, making a severly bad comment that just takes away all your credibility, first of all it's unlikely that would be the doing of a sane user, and thus the second, such a user is probably something of a troll; if your service is open-registration, there's nothing to prevent said troll from registering again, receiving zero credit, essentially excusing themselves of all debt. it just violates common sense.
i would go on but i'm teetering right now. in conclusion, abolish downmodding.
That wouldn't fix the current situation, since if you wanted to reduce somebody's karma, you just downmod their positive submissions. Almost all submissions are positive, so nevermind. People with mostly negative submissions are probably spammers anyway.
Ok I do it. Just as proof of concept that all the karma system is completely broken. Now I up voted your comments mattjaynes. It seems to me that all the karma concept have to be reinvented in new and robust way.
I think karma points function a bit like an "efficient market" Your karma points are what they are. In the long run, everything evens out to what they should be.
What happened is that someone was offended by one of your comments and they go around and make sure that you loose points. the worst thing is that some of them will follow you for a couple of days and keep doing this. The best solution is to simply write a script that counts how many time we voted down the same user's comments and do a ratio.
I've noticed this happen a couple times to users on the leader board - and it's definitely not cool. Karma shouldn't be that important...
I'll try & read through your comments to repair the damage.