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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

I think the simplest thing to do about it is to not give a hoot. The karma point system is so obviously broken that hand-wringing about its deficiencies is largely a waste of time. Case in point - the person who was lucky enough to post the google announcement regarding China got 1000+ points. Let's say a particularly insightful comment is worth 40 points. That means being first on something everyone is likely to know about within half an hour is worth 25 (count em) very insightful comments. If you take the hit of posting an unpopular opinion, you can make it up in spades by posting an old pg essay.

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While I agree that the per-user karma is worthless, comparing the rating of comments with the rating of stories is a bit like apples and oranges: multiple users can submit the same story, and when one submission "wins" over the other, little harm is done to the whole of HN. But when a comment is downvoted solely because people disagree with it, it hurts the discussion because the well constructed comment is less likely to be seen. Furthermore, this works both ways: snarky comments with little added value suddenly get a lot of appearance.

It's a very difficult problem to solve, but to just "not give a hoot" is hard, given the fact that the order of appearance for comments on HN depends so much on karma.

Actually it's a surprisingly simple problem to solve. Split comment and submission karma. Reddit, which HN was inspired by does that already.

but to just "not give a hoot" is hard

try it! at 1k or so karma you have more or less nothing to lose.

I don't think you understand my point: I agree that per-user karma records are worthless. However, I am not convinced that there is little to lose with bad comment ratings, since HN bases the appearance of comments on these ratings.

I am also interested only in the ordering of comments within a given discussion thread. The number of points that my user account gets does not matter to me.

Same with my submissions - I only care about up-votes there because I want more people to see what I have posted and benefit from it.

I don't really disagree with the point system being unfair but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "broken" either.

I think the karma system could work a lot better but it does do what it's intended which is to separate those who are dedicated to the community from those who are just fly-by trolls. I think that was all it was ever intended to do and in that sense it works well enough.

I think it's an important distinction because it reflects on what would happen when it gets "fixed". For example comments by those who just submit stories would be treated no differently than someone who just came on the site today. But I'd argue that someone who has a couple thousand submit points behind them cares quite a bit about the community and if they felt inspired to comment on something after never having commented before I'd consider that comment of the utmost importance.

So while the karma system is flawed it's not broken. It's just the most basic implementation of it's intent which is to reward people who have contributed to the community with status for having done so.

How about the following: whenever a user down votes a comment, a popup comes up describing the community rules for downvotes (e.g. "don't down vote just because you disagree", etc). After having been shown this box a couple of times it could be disabled for that user so that is isn't too annoying. New users would thus "learn" the rules as they use the site.

Do you really think the problem is lack of understanding? I mean, a reputation system is a pretty easy concept and I can't imagine there are people out there who just don't know what a Karma system is.

Which is the problem. If you understand what a karma system is than you understand you're doing damage to a person's actual reputation by down voting them. So the obvious conclusion for anyone who understands the concept of karma points is that down voting is an act designed to cause harm to the person not to express disagreement with the idea.

I can't imagine a person who doesn't have at least a subconscious understanding of such an obvious result so I don't think a notice when someone down votes would change anything

A pop-up is not going to fix the tremendous discrepancy between submission votes and comment votes. It's mostly a matter of 'how about acknowledging this was a poor idea'

Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it?

Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an insightfull comment) but there aren't that many opportunities, and it establishes competition for a good thing, having fresh news on HN.

You also tell that the referred mechanism would be gamed by people who would post old pg essays. Then again your scenario is wrong. The mechanism can be implemented to work so that the PG essays as not enough for the demand of points. And if you tell me that people would post other things just for points, isn't that the whole point of the voting/karma system?

There are problems, but I think the karma system is not obviously broken. It's true it's hard to create the right incentives to fight those problems. But HN has done it so better than everyone that I'm confident it will get better soon.

On a side note, has anyone ever tought of dynamic partitions of the community to address the problems of exponential grow and dissolution of identity?

For me, it doesn't have anything to do with karma. Maximum when people disagree with me I get a little peeved that I spent time on what I thought was a thoughtful comment only to be down voted but it happens.

I think the problem arises when thoughtful comments, maybe from people playing devil's advocate, are buried at the bottom on the thread or even worse highlighted in light gray. To be honest it probably is the exceptional case, but it's disappointing the times it does happen that those comments miss their opportunity to generate interesting discussion especially when the rest of the thread is, no offense intended, the usual hacker news echo chamber.

Economic contrarians like me quite often experience a resurgence in karma points after a user point out how unfair the downvotes is.

My opinions may be unpopular but it is respected.

There should be two sets of karma, one for comments and one for submissions

It's easy to get comment karma, as well. You just have to be the first person to post the generally prevailing opinion on whatever the current topic is. Then everyone who was coming to post the same thing will just upvote you instead.

There should be third karma for indicating obviousness which also deletes some of your comment karma

Yeah, let's just have an infinite number of separate karmas to measure every attribute of each comment.

It's not that quantifying all of these things wouldn't be great, just that you very quickly will end up with a system way too complex to be reasonable.

I think users of this forums, the majority of them programmers, can handle a few different karma arrows

But there's all kinds of issues. How do you display them all (especially if you exceed 2 sets of arrows)? How do you remember which one is which (again, not a huge issue if you just add one more karma type)? How much will having to sort by several karmas slow down the site?

Not to mention the obvious question... is there really a point to breaking everything down seven ways from Sunday?

At that point it becomes a video game, and loses any semblance of meaning anything whatsoever.

There should be no submission karma only comment karma, or submission karma should max out at a low figure like 10 (stories can have higher points but the user will only gain a maximum of 10 karma from a submission) .

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