Remember, "Karma" is for techies!

The word karma has evolved and taken a meaning of its own thanks to slashdot's use of it as a point unit.

But I have to say: I consider myself pretty good with computers and even program here and there. Yet, for the longest time I was confused about what exactly "karma" stood for. I knew it was a measurement of some sort(hey what else can a number be?) but I'd no idea about what exactly having "more karma" means.

My point is that when you use such phrases, you are assuming a specific kind of audience. Use of karma for reddit(tech-focused) is fine; even for news.yc it's fine - but for a consumer website, you should be very careful about introduction of new words. And say you love the word karma so much that you insist on using it - in that case, have a page that clearly explains what karma is assuming that the user knows nothing about it.

Karma is just one example - larger point here is to be careful about use of individual words that may have a huge role to play in your website. Thing that triggered me to make this post is I saw another poster use "karma" on their consumer start-up(bad idea IMO).

This is a mistake that is so easy to commit. Heck we did it when we launched. A lot of our users that were playing songs on our site had no idea what "Jigg It!" button meant. After couple user mails inquiring about it, we put up a tooltip saying "Jigg It if you like it!". Suddenly more people were clicking on it.

--Zaid

Actual Karma is defined as "The total effect of a person's actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person's existence, regarded as determining the person's destiny.". In hinduism there is this concept which says that whatever a person does is recorded and sum total will reflect in your next life.

Karma is the law of cause and effect. Every effect has a cause and every cause follows an effect, so karma is suggestible.