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Comment by ericjang | Hacker News Reader

What about HN karma?

HN used to show the average number of votes/post on your profile and it certainly affected my posting habits. It made me less likely to carry on conversations in the comments or post on stories that either had too much activity or had been on the front page for too long.

There were some benefits too (I started writing more substantial comments), but the net effect had some unintended problems, so I'm pretty happy they got rid of that metric.

Karma has some problems too, and could no doubt do with some adjustments, but I think that it's more useful to have it than not.

I mostly agree. The one thing I really miss is a bookmarklet I made that would highlight the top five posts on a comments page. This was especially useful for quickly finding the gems on pages with hundreds of comments. I wish there was an easy way to discover highly voted comments deeper in the threads.

I generally don't find heavily up voted stuff too useful because it represents the HN monoculture / groupthink.

I'd rather highlight comments that are controversial: they have been voted on a large number of times, with nearly 50% up vote and 50% down vote.

Those comments at least usually represent an interesting diff from either what I already think or what is stock monoculture canon on HN.

Yep. I try to work from the bottom up on threads likely to have group-think. The troll stuff is usually grayed out by the time I get to it. The answers with little info are easy to skim over. That gets to the dissenting opinions quickly.

Our team made http://quickmarklets.com at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. It can currently only be used on http websites (until we host it on https) but it lets you do what you say, on mobile phones.

Do you think it's useful btw to have bookmarklets on the mobile web? Until now, you were limited to safari extensions and intents which you had to install through the app store.

Slashdot back in the day (say circa 2000) had the karma problem. First, people would post snarky comments to get points for being funny, so Malda, Bates, et al. stopped counting "funny" towards karma. Then people started posting group think, all just to see their numbers go up. So /. capped karma at 50, which was beyond the point where you actually accrued any benefits for having good karma. Eventually they moved to a labeled five point likert scale. Apparently that stopped the nonsense since there literally was nowhere to go beyond "excellent".

HN could probably do something similar and mitigate karma ranking.

> Karma has some problems too, and could no doubt do with some adjustments, but I think that it's more useful to have it than not.

I agree that it could use adjustments.

Real-life karma is a good thing, but karma points are mostly a bandaid for "no other way of trying to keep trolling and other poor quality communication down".

The serious downside of having karma is providing undeserved power and prestige via a high status and ability to have certain actions to those that don't necessarily deserve it.

But the only way to get rid of it and get similar benefit is to have a community that can elect users into power that deserve it, like StackOverflow's elections. It would be even better if you gave the power to everyone and they were all wise enough and dependable enough to wield that power as needed, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I made a custom CSS to remove the Karma next to your profile after getting tired of seeing it and being influenced by it

http://pastebin.com/LhFrUfFa

Especially HN karma.

Just upvoted you, you will be happy to know.

HN has changed over the years, too. For example, each comment used to show its point count to every user, but it was eventually changed to be hidden to everyone but the user who made the comment.

Every now and then i'll make a post without thinking about my words and it'll come off as rude, ignorant, egotistical, etc. Thankfully it usually gets downvoted to hell. But I always feel bad afterwards and will usually take a week or so off, or spend a week logged off, until I get back to posting again. Sometimes I'll just reset my karma entirely by making a new account. It's an interesting phenomena.

I set my top bar to black for a while, to keep my eye from going to the karma display automatically every time.

I assume HN karma is why people complain when a story they submitted makes it to the front page under someone else's submission.

In the absence of karma you'd expect that would make a person happy: the story they liked is getting attention! But people get mad if they miss out on the karma of getting a story voted up.

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