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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

Given how much content is generated on online forums, it is natural to have a mechanism to surface better/relevant content (different forums define relevance differently).

My key objection is that what the majority of users think is "better/relevant" should have no influence on what I think is better and relevant. I can decide for myself, I don't need the 'hivemind'.

What's wrong with just a "deleting memes" policy?

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bcherny is saying that karma's primary function is content curation. sure, you might like a few downvoted submissions from time to time, but for most content karma scores will be saving you time sifting through a sea of content. removing content by hand requires an active and vigilant moderation team, user votes help mitigate that burden. Also, the power to 'delete' is most likely a slippery slope...

I see a lot of great content here greyed out. Including some of my own!

At the end of the day, I'm not happy to follow the collective judgment of other users.

With your suggestion, you wouldn't be able to see the content at all. It would have been deleted.

Rarely happens here, in my experience. Significantly downvoted content almost always has severe issues, either in form, tone, or quality. We sometimes might happen to agree with some controversial opinion that has been downvoted a good bit, but more often than not the tone was just not conducive to a good discussion. There's probably a few exceptions I guess, but overall the false positive rate is low enough for me.

The greying out of downvoted comments seems to me to be a separate issue to karma - and particularly egregious given that (thanks to pg) there are no standards at all for voting.

It would be nice if HN would allow sorting of threads by various filters, such as time of last reply, and/or decide whether or not low-sorted comments get greyed out.

But I'm very glad they grey out comments, including some of your own. So what do we do now ?

There's already a mechanism in HN for not seeing comments you don't want to see. You can collapse them.

The logical solution isn't to ignore or remove the karma system, but to use it better.

For example, with sufficient data to analyse, it shouldn't be tremendously difficult to find relationships between users who tend to agree or disagree, and provide each user with a customised view, taking these preferences into account.

(Of course, slashdot took a slant at making it cleverer - by allowing upvoting for different reasons - e.g. funny vs. insightful.)

The logical solution isn't to ignore or remove the karma system, but to use it better.

I much preferred online discussion pre-karma.

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