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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Ok, now both are displayed.

Now, if we could only see other peoples average karma .

Total Karma of a user can be seen on his profile page. Afaik there is no way to see another users average karma, unless he is on the leaderboard, which uses total karma as the ranking metric.

Ok, now everyone's comment avg is visible in their profile.

This discourages people from posting helpful comments that aren't likely to get many upvotes. For example,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349455

Those are all comments by me that were helpful to the parent, but which are "punished" by the public display of avg.

More is not necessarily better though is it?

"More is better" is implicit. If the number has no meaning, then why calculate and display it?

I don't get that more is implicitly better. It is pretty clear from a naive glance at the list of leaders that there are diverse average points that correlate to diverse posting styles.

If you want it scaled to fit a continuum of "bigger is always implicitly better", a more reasonable number would be: average of (comment points/parent points)

Even if a number has no [absolute cardinal, > x] meaning, there is still a nominal information value to the datum.

I have an affinity for numbers, as I'm sure many hackers do, but the dual score doesn't look/feel right to me. Might we have the average show up only if it drops below a certain level? Possibly in red, to really emphasize the point?

This could help with another gripe I have with displaying average points (and comment voting in general), which is that oftentimes quality comments are downvoted simply for being contrary to the downvoter(s) views, and/or groupthink.

Thank you. I use the total karma number as a quick indicator of whether or not I am getting replies to an active conversation. That works for me since there are usually upvotes if there are replies to a comment.

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