I have one suggestion that would possibly help: separate out "saved" versus "up-voted". For me, I rarely want to save something but I would love to go to the new page and up-vote more interesting stories to get rid of the noise. But maybe that's just me--I'm also the type who never submits anything unless I want to see the discussion on it. I'm guessing there's a lot of karma-whores and hence all the TechCrunch articles (I kid, I kid). Anyone have an idea for putting the incentives in the right place for submitting with that in mind? Fractional karma for submission up-votes?
Upvoting a submission also adds it to a list of saved submissions. Thus, if one uses that list to remember interesting articles, discussions, or things that one wishes to read, upvoting many articles which one does not necessarily want saved would dilute that list.
Yea I just found out about that feature. I was trying to figure out how to add an article to my saved list and was dumbfounded to find the one I wanted to save already in my list! I thought for briefly (for as long as my intelligence would allow) Ycombinator had read my mind and it turned out it was cause I voted it up. Yep, so intuitive!
Oh. I guess I never used that feature. I just either bookmark the link in my browser, keep a tab open with that article, or just keep the original link to the story in my RSS reader.
Then I'm sure you won't mind me down voting you for being ridiculous (since "x points" is the first thing at the beginning of every comment/submission)
I thought the points was just a rating for the comment or submission. I didn't realize those points were transferred to the user that made the comment/submission.
As for your down voting me, whatever. Enjoy. I don't even know what use karma can be on this website. Though at least now I know there is some.
If it's any consolation I felt bad about down voting you just after I did it but I thought you were trying to be obnoxious. Sadly, you can't undownvote (but I'll up vote this to try to supplement your newly discovered karma score)
Make that a second person - and I've been on the site for over a year. I knew that _comments_ added Karma, but I wasn't aware that a story submission's Karma is added to a person's total.
I've always wondered how someone who has been on the site for less than a year can have a Karma > 1000 points. I always thought they were posting a lot - but a dozen 50 Point submissions will get you halfway there pretty quickly...
