>My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight.
I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system.
This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it.
The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful.
Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?
This is why I was against hiding karma on posts. I suspect that it drives the points reward up for one liners, since there's no way to balance things downwards, ie. not upvote or downvote if you think a post has too many points.
And I think the upvote is pretty much set in stone now. It's essentially "I like this post" or "I don't like this post", there's not much nuance.
I wasn't around at that point, but I disagree with you. Let me explain why.
You shouldn't downvote a comment because it "has too many points." If you think a post deserves a downvote, do so. Whether 25 or five or zero people before you thought so shouldn't play any role in how you perceive the quality of that post.
But in aggregate, it means that a throwaway one liner becomes much more valuable (from a karma/algorithm perspective at least). It removes a large amount of control from the people commenting.
In a previous comment on karma systems I suggested a scheme where there was a voting 'diamond' up, down, left, right, and center. Where up was "good comment/submission" and down was "not-good comment/submission", left was "less like this", and right was "more like this" and center was perfect.
That allows you to establish both what you like the site to have in it, and how you much you liked this instance of it. Perfect would mean simply that "spot on" or "this."
The second part of the system would then adjust the presentation of your karma (to you and others) unscaled vector along the line to the 'perfect' site in the context of the viewer.
To use a simple example, lets say HN was over run with cat pictures, and I thought they were the best so I vote like this and "+1" (up and to the right), You the reader hate cat pictures so you always vote down/less like this.
So we've created virtual root nodes at +loves cat pictures and one at +hates cat pictures. Now I can plot your karma as negative with respect to mine if we assume that the center point between your root nexus and mine is 0. Now do this with enough topics and you get multiple consituencies all in the same discussion space where your view of their karma will inform you how likely it is you'll like to read what they wrote :-)
I had an idea to plot comment karma as a function of number of replies, and upvotes. So the axis would be 'discussion' and 'popularity'. A controversial opinion is probably unpopular but heavily discussed. Likewise, a pithy one-liner is popular but not discussed. Then you can see whether you tend to just parrot public sentiment and spout off-the-cuff remarks, or whether you create interesting conversations.
The problem with your proposal is that most people think they're objective most of the time. The less/more like this distinction relies on people knowing and admitting that sometimes the stuff they like is not better than the stuff they don't like.
slashdot does let you choose the meaning of your "upvote". While its comment system is far from perfect, it does have many good ideas. For some reason, I felt like karma whoring was less of an issue back when I was over there. Maybe because you could only be upvoted 5 times per comment, and you couldn't directly submit stories.
This is the one thing I have always missed about slashdot discussions. I rarely value the "humorous" posts on sites like this. It is not that I do not find the jokes funny, I do, its just that I'd rather increase the SNR even at the cost of a few chuckles. I think the big impediment to widespread adoption is the difficulty in creating an useful interface for tracking "kind of upvote" and then filtering based on type of upvote. I always had my slashdot prefs set up so that I never saw the "+5 funny comments."
I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement.
Karma's value to the casual visitor is in communicating quality content that's been flagged by the community worker bees - the karma "waggle dance" :) From that perspective you want to be critical and only add weight to the "best things".
However karma also plays a very significant role in guiding people as to how to modify their behaviour such that the community appreciates them. We all want to be liked by communities we identify with and karma is a powerful tool to see how we can "fit in".
Karma is an incredibly powerful tool to communicate in a very discrete way to new community members how they can establish themselves.
As the karma-moderator I find myself looking to give the community ways award karma wherever I can. I'm not worried about how insignificant the effort that it was rewarding; all I want to do is give people encouragement when they do something (anything) the community appreciates.
Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob.
This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc).
The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.
The obvious answer here would be Slashdot's system- not just upvotes, but specific categories of upvote. It seems to work well, but it does add an overhead to the action of upvoting an item.
I definitely feel you here. This is a trend I see absolutely everywhere; hell, I was surprised to find out it even extends into video games that implement this kind of voting system.
This problem feels like it could be solvable by changing the "meaning" of the upvote. Right now, the upvote is a tool that allows you to make a comment more visible and to throw a bone to the author in the form of karma. People probably feel inclined to "tip" someone who makes a clever or witty comment with the karma from the upvote. On top of that, people making witty comments who get upvoted are now encouraged to make more witty and unproductive comments because they know that they will get karma for it.
The issue is that the upvote represents general approval of a comment, rather than a nod of the head that a comment is productive or insightful.
Just throwing around ideas - maybe the elimination of the user-karma-tracking system altogether is a reasonable solution?