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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

This has been an intentional change that happened at least a couple of months ago. The idea is to discourage smart-ass remarks by punishing them more harshly, but also to discourage piling onto a downvote frienzy by not displaying the extraordinarily low vote count.

I'm not convinced that works, since the post still goes lighter, so you can tell how badly it's been downvoted, but that's the intention.

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To be honest I hadn't noticed a problem with too many smart-ass remarks before the change. Everyone makes poor decisions from time to time and punishing them more harshly seems unnecessary.

"punish"? As far as I know, you can't cash in karma for money or women. So I am not sure what you lose when you get downvoted to minus a billion.

The punishment is the removal of your voice from the conversation. Everyone wants to be heard :)

I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. If you give people a numerical rating most will feel compelled to improve their standing. Losing karma is negative feedback (hence punishment).

It doesn't matter that your HN karma score isn't going to get you laid[1], people generally care about anything they're scored on.

[1] If it did edw519 would probably be dead from exhaustion or at least severely chafed.

Just so long as you understand that it doesn't work this way for everyone.

I hate the notion of karma used by sites like HN and Reddit. It turns the content of the site into a popularity contest, specifically because the motivation you're talking about encourages people to do things that have crowd appeal. Conversely, when an active, respected community member -- like jrockway for example -- says something offbeat, controversial, or just different from the prevailing opinion of the audience, and then gets "punished" for it by this collective reduction of a totally worthless number ... to me, all that does is reflect badly on the community.

To be honest, I have a pretty low opinion of a lot of the HN community, and the karma system contributes to that.

I agree. There is much less interesting discussion here than on sites without karma. The groupthink on HN is even worse than on reddit.

I'm not sure how you can make this statement with a straight face. Name another site with tens of thousands of active users having this level of discussion without karma.

(the fact that you're not being downvoted for making such an egregiously incorrect statement is proof if it was needed that the groupthink is not so bad, btw)

Tens of thousands of users I don't know, but Lambda the Ultimate for example. Discussion on blog posts also generally has less groupthink.

Voting was intended as upvote means good comment and downvote means bad comment, but people use it as upvote means "I agree" and downvote means "I disagree". Not everyone of course, but a lot of people do. This problem is less severe on hacker news than on reddit, but on reddit more people keep posting regardless of downvotes whereas here they are banned from the site.

LtU has a decent community because it covers relatively esoteric stuff, and excludes a general audience by design. HN, on its worst days, is a glorified comments section for tech industry blogs.

I think you know what you gain from having high karma. If you didn't, I doubt you would have felt compelled to earn your ~18,000 karma over the past 3 years.

He could be arguing in his spare time.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're getting at. Are you insinuating that he has a lot of spare time, or that I do, or what?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y

I get the reference now, but I'm a bit disappointed. I was looking for an argument. ;)

...I don't know what's gained from having high karma (seriously). Could you explain that?

I dunno that you could say that someone has "earned" something that's primarily the result of their spending some spare time in a community and usually behaving in a way that the community likes.

>>...I don't know what's gained from having high karma (seriously). Could you explain that.

On this site you gain preference by the ranking algorithm, for one thing. Your comments and votes hold more weight. Outside of that, many people believe the karma makes the man and not the other way around. It can be an instant way to determine whether someone making a statement is qualified to make that statement. Of course that isn't how it should be, but that is how the human brain works until you've trained it otherwise. I've seen people with 10k karma make an ass of themselves and people with 30 karma divulge great insight, but the image is still there.

I would say on Hacker News you do more or less earn your karma. Since this community doesn't take too kindly to smart ass comments you are forced to conform to a higher standard than you find on other communities that give their users karma.

It's not perfect, but I do believe if you have high karma you have earned it (on Hacker News).

OK, but none of that has any impact at all on anything outside of HN. (With the possible exception of edw519, who's got such a high amount of karma that it might be breaking the fourth wall and spilling over into the rest of his life.)

> Since this community doesn't take too kindly to smart ass comments you are forced to conform to a higher standard...

Assumptions in this statement:

1. Everyone always wants to make smart-ass comments.

2. Nobody wants to behave this way anyway.

3. Smart-ass comments are never rewarded here.

I don't think I agree with any of those. I behave here exactly the way I did on Reddit; I simply no longer spend any time on Reddit. Nor does the karma system here discourage me from saying anything or behaving in a particular way. At the most, I might withhold an opinion on something simply because I don't feel like it's worth defending. (I'm spending so much effort ranting about karma here because I'm hoping that maybe someone will read it later and consider doing something different in the next social whattathingamajig.)

Certainly your karma impacts what you do outside of HN if it draws people to contact you outside of HN, or compels them to take to interest in your projects.

I don't believe my statement made any of the assumptions you listed.

Not everyone wants to make smart-ass comments, but many do. This is more true with people outside our community (Redditers) than for people who have been part of this community for a while. Smart-ass comments are sometimes rewarded here and that is somewhat unfortunate. The general rule however is that they are not. You do not behave like your standard Redditer, and that might be why you no longer engage in discussion there.

I love how you talk about Redditors the way many of them talk about Digg users, and yet somehow still act as if that sets you apart from them.

Nevermind, carry on.

I know you're on a comedic roll, but "women" are not objects to be earned, owned and traded as prizes.

Please mind your language.

Well, not in some societies anyway.

Whether your parent's comment constitutes inappropriate objectification of women or instead your comment constitutes an insufficient sense of humor, that debate could fill volumes. Now is not the time for that.

Please stop moralizing.

If you're too sensitive to take a joke, get the fuck out of my internet.

Considering the relative rationality and aversion to groupthink that people on HN seem to have, this seems to me (although I don't have much experience with moderating online communities) like a generally bad idea. I would expect people to see that Post X has -Y points and desist because the poster doesn't deserve -(Y + 1) karma for the comment. Hiding this information from the downvoter makes him do something he might otherwise not do, and I would expect this effect to be far greater on a site like HN than the drive to "pile onto a downvote frenzy."

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