Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

Has it occurred to anyone else that the HN karma system is a performance measurement technique that undermines the goals of HN? I've stopped commenting, largely because for any comment I might make, I can imagine the cynical karma-harvesting comment that someone will make in response, the comment that would never have been made if there were no karma system here. And when I do comment, I waste a lot of time trying to harden my comments to such opportunism.

View on HN

I've largely stopped commenting due to karma also. It's not just that wording the same sentiment differently can result in either up or downvotes, it's that I don't want to have to care about getting points on the internet

Right on. I'm a photographer as well as a programmer, and I've largely stopped sharing photos on Instagram because I don't want to measure my work based on the number of likes each receives, and I don't want the people I care about who "follow" me there to feel the need to like my work. I've watched friends go through their various networks' feeds and mechanically like, react, whatever lest their friends think they're giving them the cold shoulder.

For the same reason, I've come to find using Uber exhausting. Why do I care about my 4.75 (was 4.77) rating? I take taxis whenever practical because I don't want to endanger my rating by making too much small talk or not making enough small talk.

But the points give your brain dopamine hits as you struggle to write 5000 unit tests against a 3rd party JSON API over a span of 1 month!

If HN were to revamp how it handled comment sorting, what features would get you to comment again?

A thought experiment: What if HN changed nothing except that it never displayed point counts for posts, comments, or users? I think it would tamp down gadfly behavior. It may also, however, do the same to behavior that we want to encourage. There are no easy answers.

Maybe, but consider how terrible the conversation is on most Internet forums. Since it's hard to prove a counterfactual, we don't know for sure whether the point system is making things better or worse.

Looking at upvoted versus downvoted comments, my impression is that it makes things better overall with some subtle downsides, but it is hard to show this.

Meh, it's just a fact of the internet. Many sites often turn into an echo chamber and you can choose to either get with it, ignore it, or just get off the internet. This site isn't too bad (compared to say, Reddit) so I stick around despite the flaws.

Why not just not bother reading replies?

That's not a discussion or dialog. Sharing what you know is only half the motive. Seeing the responses and learning something new is the other half.

When you already know what the response is likely to be (because most people are pandering for karma), it's just as pointless.

I don't understand the point of making a comment if one has no interest in reading replies.

You comment on someone else's comment, or the article. What you will get as replies, if anything, is unknown at the time of writing. Thus, it need not be and cannot be part of the process of writing the comment in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com