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Comment by marshallp | Hacker News Reader

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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