Hiding HN Karma
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acooke.org
This bothered me and sometimes I'd get disappointed in the community's apparent unwillingness to appreciate my obvious total superiority in all matters of opinion. Sometimes I'd stop commenting for awhile - after all, they don't deserve my great and valuable insights!
Eventually, probably in the shower, I began to realize that I was an idiot. It's stupid to get bent out of shape when people don't agree with your every word or understand your every joke. After reading over some of my lower rated comments, it also became clear that most of the time they actually sucked. :) I decided to make a conscious effort to watch myself for that kind of thinking and to curb it before it dominated my mood the rest of the day. It has influenced me deeply in ways that extend far beyond this site.
I'm now a chang(ed/ing) man. I'd be lying if the occasional down vote didn't still irritate me now and then, but I've successfully trained myself to use the comment scores as a reminder that we're not all the same and that it is a valuable and important thing to internalize. I try to learn from it.
If you want to hide the scores - more power to you. It's no skin off my back and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the site in the least. You don't have to feel guilty about doing it. I would just ask that you consider putting some real time into trying to figure out why the scores bother you and decide, once a reason is identified, if it's something worth changing your mind over or not. Perhaps it isn't. No big deal. We all see the world slightly differently.
Upvoted to show agreement with this idea that comment scores can teach each commenter about how the commenter fits into a diverse community. Not necessarily every true comment will be upvoted for helpfulness, and not necessarily every funny comment will amuse other participants, but every comment obtains a score, and the person posting comments can learn in the aggregate from each and every score. Ups and downs come in life, and so upvotes and downvotes are attached to comments. But every human being has opportunity to learn every day.
However karma controlled me from posting everything coming in to my mind (I think it's a good thing to have a clean meaningful conversation). And the occasional comments that express my sense of humor were affected so I hesitate to share those.
Anyway HN is not what it used to be and there are many kinds of people here. So obviously they think different and there's a great chance there can be many people who disagree with you and actually go forward and downmod. But you should post your comment if you think your opinion is still right, after you think twice.
You can learn a lot more than this from low-rated comments. Like highly-scored comments, they allow you to get a feel for what the community as a whole thinks. (If your comment is at -4, it's only there because it can't be downmodded any further.)
Here's an example. One thing that bugs me is when people spend an hour writing a rant about some simple bug in an open-source project. I reply, "comment out the line in question and send them a patch". This is nearly always downmodded to -4. What I've learned from this is that people here don't really want to write good software, they just want to talk. It is a discussion site, after all. But I think it's funny that the idea of, gasp!, contributing to an open-source project they use is so offensive that 5 or more people would click the downmod button on a post suggesting it.
(And in case you think I'm saying "every time I get downmodded, it's because I'm so much smarter than everyone else, and they just don't get it," that's not true. Most of the time, I'm intentionally being a dick because that amuses me, and the most karma I can lose is 5 points.)
I would just ask that you consider putting some real time into trying to figure out why the scores bother you and decide, once a reason is identified, if it's something worth changing your mind over or not. Perhaps it isn't. No big deal. We all see the world slightly differently.
I mentioned in another comment that karma is a good way to encourage people to contribute in the beginning, since it's a way to make the contributers easily identifiable. Later on, though, the effect is the opposite. You are a smart person, but suddenly you have to compete with the people that have been around longer. They have 20,000 karma, and you have 700. Naturally, you are going to hate karma, because people tend to say "well, if you had been here longer..." instead of actually engaging you in real conversation.
I had this problem on Perlmonks. I remember hearing, "I don't know who this jrockway is, but he only has 4 XP, so you should probably ignore him." Of course, I wrote the book that was being discussed in the thread. What would I know about that? So because of this bitter taste in my mouth, I never bothered reading Perlmonks (except for some of the classics, like btilly's rant on "functional programming".)
StackOverflow came along, everyone started at 0, I answered a few Perl questions, and now I am near the top there.
But it's not all good. Just the other day, I got 100+ karma for answering "How do I write a program to print 'hello world' reversed" with "print "dlrow olleh". Why do I deserve a better reputation for that? (Why did I post it in the first place? Dunno, maybe I was bored? Or tired of dumb homework questions?)
It sounds dumb if you think about it, but here we are. People trust the karma number, but it's really not worth trusting. Except when it is.
but anyway, i'm not saying karma is not useful - this just makes the way i use the site less frustrating for me. i threw it out there in case others felt the same way, is all.
So something at the top 10% percentile would have small green icon next to it. The colour would be a gradient till it reaches the bottom 10%, where it would show red.
This would make it even easier to scan, to look at top comments just search for green..... just a thought.
Personally, carrying on a debate with people via keyboard is very slow and tedious. Carrying on debates with anonymous folks along with the so-called Karma system (I think it's more of an Applause Meter) tends to sway argument based on popularity and acceptance. The 'karma' system generally leads to: "Oh, you just insulted my iPad...minus 1 for you!", or "How dare you consider JSON to be stupid...minus 1".
Toss the "points". Besides, what prize am I working towards?
I'll troll here for good articles, but I've lost any interest in being "part of the community" (a.k.a. schoolyard).
I can attest to that - I'm a new poster; and I'm still getting the feel for the community here. Karma helps bring me up to speed far quicker than other existing forum systems.
It's a great place to find references to good articles. I find participating in discussions, over time, a huge time drain and stress producer. It's anonymous debate with the masses (smart as many of them are), with an applause meter running the whole time.
Good point. That said, at a crude level Karma works for telling the user what kinds of comments are expected. I am tempted, for instance, to make funny one-liners on some HN topics. Karma makes me rethink that decision, as in: does it contribute to the discussion? The posters here seem to reward intelligent analysis, so maybe a one-liner isn't a smart move ... and so on so forth.
Certainly, various geek social dysfunctions tend to get a free pass (empty snark, ridiculously aggressive tone, ignoring most of what someone's said to knee-jerk on minutia, etc.), but you'll get that in any geek crowd. HN does tend to react properly to other forms of rudeness.
I like votes as a clue to the reactions of the people reading threads, myself. I don't always agree with or approve of the reactions (this place is not exactly great when gender issues come up), but that's just dealing with people.
Mind, sometimes it just isn't worth dealing with people - there's nothing wrong with skipping the chatter if it's not useful to you.
(Personally, my main gripe is that people tend to vastly prefer a short, pithy remark over a clearly-written and more nuanced bit of, say, anything more than this comment's length. To see an offhand remark I spent a second typing get double the votes of something I've more seriously considered irks a bit.)
"Mind, sometimes it just isn't worth dealing with people". Agreed!
Again, a good place for articles, but I'll avoid the schoolyard from here on out. Enjoy your "community".
I know. Here it comes: 3-2-1.....down-voting ensues.
If there was one thing I would change, it would be how karma is doled out for submissions. It seems unfair that if someone submits my blog that I don't get any points for the post. But since I am usually first to submit my own stuff, I guess I don't really care :)
on the flip side there's a lot of boilerplate and it may make things run slower (i have no comparison - this is the first time i've written one of these).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589
from not quite three months ago?
(I'm not trying to be factious, I'm genuinely interested)
I saw one of the things you listed in previous comments is you don't get up voted when you get closest to the correct answer. Is it that important?
obviously the same kind of thing happens in real life, but there conversation is much more fluid, so these signs are transient and negotiable. also, there's not a finite number of rooms in which you can chat to other people - it's easier to adapt the context.
someone else has said how they managed to get over this in the shower. good for them. i got over it by writing a greasemonkey script. generally i find writing a script to be easier than changing my (largely subconscious) cognitive processes, but ymmv.
I appreciate your reply though, I am always interested to understand peoples frustrations with such things. Whether it is with my own applications or other peoples.