To use the voting average is a really bad way of doing this. I answer a lot of 'Ask HN' style threads, these are hardly ever voted up and they are a ton of work.
If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart.
it punishes people for a lot of things: for being nice to others and responding to unresponded-to inquiries, for participating in lengthy discussions that don't particularly keep the majority of people's interest, expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..
why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.
...expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..
Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.
Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it.
> I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.
That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff.
On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber.
Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded.
It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.
Yes, jacquesm, you were one of the first names I began to recognize, and in one early thread you were being downvoted, something to do with poverty differences in nations I believe. I thought man this guy is getting beat down, but you stood your ground and kept making your point. I respected and admired that. As for the karma points for submissions I'd rather see a 5 point maximum awarded. Some submissions get over 100 votes, but I've never seen even the most insightful comment do that. I guess it becomes more important depending on what we take karma to mean and be used for.
Agreed. I know how to write comments that get tons of upvotes, but most of the comments I write aren't those kinds of comments, because I think there are other types of comments that also add a lot of value even if they don't get any upvotes.
There are always going to be outlying cases, whatever strategy you use. I suppose I could fix this one by making the threshold depend on either average comment karma or total karma. But as I said, my inclination now is just to stop displaying points on comment threads.
If I wanted to boost my comment score average, I would very deliberately formulate even more bogus opinions about popular "controversies". Oh, I sure would come up with a lot of crap to say about Zynga, the Apple Tablet, and Websprockets.
It would work, because haunting the less popular topics has been a surefire way to get my average to drop.
That would take care of the Ask HN threads as well, especially since these suffer from the additional burden of being identified as 'self posts' so they are hardly ever on the top of the homepage.
But the issue is not one of displaying or not displaying, the issue is one of functionality, of votes not being counted.
If you do not display the votes but you do pretend that you're counting them you have not solved the problem at all.
On an 'average' forum that sort of trick might work but HN is populated by some of the smartest people I have run in to in the last 20 years or so and it will not take them much work at all to find out whether or not their votes are counted.
I suggested this before, but I think it was well after you stopped reading the threads. Let me try again:
Why not show a percentile for comments? Before there are 10 or 20 or so comments on a page, don't show any score of any kind (except maybe gray out really bad comments). Then, when the number of comments is high enough, display a percentile compared to all the other positively ranked comments. You can still use points internally, but you display a much fuzzier number to users. It is useful to quickly pick out the best comments to read, but once a comment becomes one of the best in the thread, no one will have to keep voting it up (and similar for down). People will just cast votes to say "this comment is over (or under) valued" not to say "This comment deserves another (or one less) karma point".
I'd really love to see you run that experiment for a day or two :-) What do you say?
It will at least make people that have been here for a long time have the same privileges as an account that is less than 5 minutes old.
I'd hate to be in your shoes on this one, it's one of those 'damned if you do/damned if you don't' kind of things.
From the sidelines it is easy enough to criticize but I've run enough websites to know that a users point of view is not always the same as the point of view of the person that tries to maintain the atmosphere.
I'm all for dropping the points, in fact, as far as I'm concerned you can drop the leaderboard as well.
If someone is interested in the karma of a user they can always go and look at the profile.
At least like that we get rid of stupid comments like 'I made it my mission to be in the top 100'.
The leaderboard does not really seem like it is that impressive anyway. It seems to me that a well formulated bot could easily surpass the highest ranked listings at this point.
Think of the leaderboard as an odometer, it basically logs how much time you spend on HN.
If I had to put a number on it I'd say 1 karma point today equates anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes of work on HN.
If you were to express that in money, given the kind of expertise that walks around here anybody on the leaderboard has spent upwards of several thousand $ worth of their time, which gives you an idea of how much they get back out of it.
If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart.
For instance:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551
Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.