Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric:
For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.
For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.
I don't downvote often, and I don't have anything against you, but it is important that everyone, especially the lurkers, feel welcome here. My downvote is to show you don't speak for all of the community, since this response and my karma means your comment is self refuting.
Content based filtering is extremely expensive, just look at email. Reputation based filtering is quick and easy both for people and computers, but it has its own drawbacks, I agree.
To illustrate another subtle point. Lets, take your karma and compare it with mine and compare mine with someone like nickb. Now what conclusions can I draw about whether I fit into this community.
I can see that you joined a year ago but didn't gain much karma. That means that you're an old timer, but a lurker, who doesn't post or comment often.
nickb and other top 10 karma users define this community and they lead by example.
I joined just recently, because I somebody posted a story about my startup and I had to comment. But since that I've been posting stuff that people care about.
All this is visible by looking at the profile of the user, without knowing exact posting history. This is huge time saver for everybody involved.
Finally, as a supposed 'lurker', it might serve me better not to login and just read submissions instead of participating by voting. Clearly, voting and commenting are also measures of 'being in a community'. So as lurkers stop logging in they cannot vote and then voting drops making the submission rankings either volatile or static.
I do not understand your line of reasoning.
Do you know a better system?
Yes, I am suggesting an alternate mechanism which uses only voting on submissions and comments while discarding individual karma.
In fact, if it were the case that only the high karma belong, there'd be nothing to contribute to and no high karma. People like kashif and the thousands of other lurkers are why this community exists in the first place, much more so than nickb or any of the other leaders.
Speaking for myself, I have a high karma because I'm a slacker. I consider it an inverse metric of my worth.
So my question:
What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery site] good enough? Would the theoretically perfect ordering offer much more value than current systems?
That's a very clever detail.