Ask HN: Avg. replaced Karma in top bar? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Avg. replaced Karma in top bar?

65 pointsolalonde114 comments

Is this a bug or feature? Am I the only one getting this?

I'm not crazy about average points per comment. If you make a good comment very early on a popular post, you get a lot more karma for your comment than if you make the exact same comment late in the posts's life or worse still on an unpopular post. That's fine, exposing good things to fewer eyeballs is less valuable, and that's why you get less karma for it. But if it gets a few upvotes it's still helping someone, somewhere.

However, average karma per post gently nudges us towards avoiding circumstances where a comment might get low karma, such as on a post that is less popular.

Whereas, total karma encourages users to let a thousand flowers bloom. There's a disincentive to post anything that might get downvoted, and that's fine, but otherwise there's no harm in making a comment anywhere and not worrying about whether your seed has fallen on fertile ground.

You could "fix' things by weighting karma per post by eyeballs, or disregard average karma per post. I choose the latter course as I'm not a moderator and even if I were I'm unsure how the number relates to behaviour HN is trying to encourage.

Or you could not just worry about your karma score, or your average and just post when you think you've got something to say and say it. I don't get the obsession with karma and people getting annoyed when they get down voted. Be yourself and if people disagree so be it

The point is shaping aggregate community behavior.

The attitude you are advocating is an internet-age-old drumbeat since Slashdot introduced moderators, and we are better for it, but the fact is that karma does affect people's behavior is undeniable and statistically immutable; therefore your point doesn't really address raganwald's concern.

I think we're in violent agreement. I just want to note that 'worrying about it when deciding what/whether to post' is not the same thing as 'finding a discussion about it interesting.'

At this point in software history, all software is social software. Therefore, discussions about social behaviour and how it is affected by mechanisms and features is extremely relevant to the business of making software. So I'm fascinated by the subject of karma even if I don't try very hard to accumulate any.

HN is based on karma--you only get access to certain features at given thresholds. It's something you have to care about if you ever want to be able to make full use of the site.

I think a time-based system might go along with karma well. If you stay above a certain level for long enough, you get access to the next feature level.

You still have to work your way up the karma tree, but you're not doing it for the features.

"... HN is based on karma ..."

HN is based on the quality of your ideas.

I'm talking about the software behind HN, not the community.

wait, what are these levels? I don't know if I have ever been aware of this other than just the downvote privilege based on average comment score.

I don't know of any others aside from the poll privilege, but it works whether there's one or 100 levels.

There is also a threshold to change the color of the bar at the top.

Without a high karma score, how are you supposed to downvote comments? You can't have certain features unlocked by karma and then tell people not to care about their score.

Totally agree. Sometimes I type up a controversial reply, and then scrap it because I feel like it's going to be received poorly (took me a bit of thinking to post this comment, even!).

I'm sure a lot of good discussions never exist because of this. Even without avg. karma though, reputation is still at risk, so the problem won't be solved by removing/showing that statistic.

Controversial comments sometimes get down voted but other times get up voted as hell. I think on average, it's quite safe from a karma perspective to be controversial even though you have to take the occasional down votes.

There are certain topics which are more likely to be downvoted - criticism of Steve Jobs is an example (and conversely criticism of Steve Balmer is likely to be upvoted).

There's nothing wrong with caring about HN karma, so long as you care about karma less than you care about speaking your mind.

If you post a lot, the noise of one or two unpopular comments gets drowned out. I'm at 14,613 karma with an average of 6.02. If this post gets downvoted to -30, I might end up with an average of 6.01. I doubt I'd notice.

It's not your overall average, but over a much smaller set (the last N comments, with N being a fairly small integer), 50 or 100 or so.

Don't worry, it's just an experiment.

Since this may cause people to care about comment averages, here's how they're calculated:

    ; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
    ; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.

    (def comment-score (user)
      (aif (check (nthcdr 5 (comments user 50)) [len> _ 10])
           (avg (cdr (sort > (map !score (rem !deleted it)))))
           nil))

Comment averages are updated asynchronously.

@pg, i think the average is a bad way of doing it. it discourages people from commenting on low-traffic, or old threads.

the game becomes that of other threaded comment systems where you get more up votes on heavily traffic-ed threads. it should push the long tail of comments further out, and have fewer threads with high traffic. someone trying to game the system might look for threads with say 10-15 points and then make a comment, hoping they get above the average. it's like investing in DOW companies during an economic upswing.

your karma actually should not be purely based on uptick, but should represent some amount of risk you took, and then measure that against how well the community responded to it.

so commenting on old or low-traffic threads could still be of value.

I think your 'just an experiment' mentality works well to avoid a lot of premature criticism. Also helps you mentally detach from taking things too personally.

I am going to experiment with labeling things as experiments.

I don't think the criticism is premature. The has been visible as long as I've been here.

And it definitely discourages commenting in low-traffic threads when the average isn't normalized for viewers.

I hope you realize that this is an actual experiment and that the language usage isn't just being used as a way to diffuse criticism.

By that theory you can also ignore the lowest-scoring karma (if negative karmas are being added), as some might have had bad day or unlucky thrashing.

If you continue along that line, you end up using the median comment score... which might incidentally be an interresting experiment.

Some thoughts, assuming most of everyone's comments are ignored (success being a stronger function of practice instead of inborn genius) and that commenters with high means are probably being pulled up by a number of outliers.

   1. Median obviously is less suspect to a small number of very
      popular comments which probably describes many users pretty
      well. It's the "betting value" for a game where loss is 
      linear with error.
   2. I'm not sure whether median would be higher or lower for 
      most. Poisson distribution suggests higher medians, but 
      many probably have a bunch of 1-karma comments to weight 
      the origin.
   3. A HUGE psychological difference is that median would be 
      discreteness. Instead of seeming to be a smooth value 
      related (probably naively) to community engagement and 
      improvement it'll look more like a set of clubs. 0-medkarma 
      could be a rabble-rouser, 3-medkarma is consistently 
      meaningful. 10-medkarma means maybe you should run for office.

Your third point is compelling.

Psychologically, it diverts attention away from a specific number, and toward a general concept of "goodness", segregated by club. Then, rather then concentrating on getting the next karma point, users try to enter certain club, and each club has a general identity to it (with the top being those who provide thoughtful, intelligent responses, and typically only speak when they have something to say).

Creating different clubs (creating classes of users) isn't arguably bad so long as there is easy mobility between classes based on merit.

The natural question is how and whether to indicate the "class" or "club" a user is in. Make it public? Indicate it in comments? PG tried a red dot next to high-karma users some time ago, then scrapped it; maybe there's some other way to reward users based on club achieved.

This is exactly how I feel, but am not sure that's a developed enough thought yet. I think discrete 'club' separation is a powerful force for social organization, especially if there is a tangible benefit for inclusion. I also think that median comment score probably isn't completely tracking the kind of behavior that should earn entrance into such clubs.

Both thoughts depend on figuring out more completely what club membership means; it's something I can't flesh out well despite having a feeling it might be beneficial.

Back when he capped downvoting to -4, I would definitely disagree with you, because that prevented serious negative outliners.

What if the average rounds everything under some threshold (say -10) up to that threshold? So your total karma can get totally trashed by one heavily-downvoted comment, but there's a limit to how badly your average gets hit.

But really, I'd guess that 99% of comments that go below -10 are clearly intentionally trolling, so it's probably not an issue.

That's not true - bad jokes also get you a bunch of downvotes. Downvoting is how you emote a groan on here.

By the way, these "experiments" are pretty freaking cool: the fact that they could be done by just typing stuff into a REPL on the server isn't something I had ever considered before.

I think typing new function definitions into your live site seems very appropriate for a place called Hacker News.

Huh? I thought that was a snippet from one of his source files.

As part of your experiments, have you also changed the downvote threshold, or modified it to be based on average karma, not total karma? I ask because I notice that I've lost the ability to downvote - not that I'm especially irritated, as I'm of the opinion that downvotes are generally not an especially good thing, as they can encourage negative behaviors, but just wondering.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529

Downvote threshold now 500. Glad I got to the old threshold (201) in time to see how it worked.

Think my possible upvote demographic for this comment is the set of all Hacker News users between 201 and 500 karma.

I'm dissapointed its been increased. I try and only speak when I have something especially interesting to say. But I regularly vote and in my opinion, vote sensibly. Its a shame to be penalised for quietness.

That's very likely in keeping with another recent thread here, entitled "Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852560 ). One of the threadlets suggested possibilities like eliminating downvotes altogether and replacing them with the option to flag comments as inappropriate, the idea being that "no up" is a good enough disincentive for most purposes, and that downvoting should be considered a drastic measure. I think I've used the privilege twice, and I'm still not entirely sure that one of those downvotes was truly righteous.

I just noticed that, too. Presumably there is some new, average-based threshold for downvoting in this rep grind system?

For long-time users, isn't this number pretty much going to be static?

I'd love to have a running average of my last 10-20 comments rather than ALL of them.

Mine varies by a couple of points over the course of days, generally. The occasional +50 comment can bump things up, as can refraining from making a bunch of +1 or +2 comments.

Yeah, we have to build up an intuition as to how the new metrics are useful to us as commenters and a community... and in the short term I think most of us won't be affected by it at all.

Here's how avg. karma has affected my behaviour (including its before the latest change, moreso now):

My average at this moment is 7.64. By giving all this weight to avg. karma, the message from the site to the users is clear: "higher avg. karma is better, work to improve yours". In my case, this means I should make a comment only if I expect it to get 8 upvotes or more. This in turn means that I should not respond to replies to my comments, as they rarely get to 8+. I should also not reply to articles late in the game as it's unlikely to get to the threshold also. So what will I respond to? Early threads where I feel I can make a contribution. It is also unlikely that I will make 'eccentric' comments that are a risk in terms of votes, but may help break the echo chamber as this behaviour is not encouraged. The only other case I may make a comment is when I feel strongly enough about something that I am willing to take the hit, as in the case of this comment.

Now, many will say that I should ignore karma altogether and that I should just participate in the community as if it didn't exist. For one thing, this is orthogonal to the discussion here. pg has made this change to alter the community's behaviour, therefore he expects it to have an impact. Even if I chose to disregard it, nothing will change in the general case. Secondly, poster avg. karma affects ordering of comments and therefore the impact that your comments have. So it materially affects your experience in this community, and when I have something to say that I feel needs to be said, I benefit from it having the highest possible impact. This makes me care about avg. karma in all other situations.

On the other hand, submitting articles is not subject to such pressures, so I will happily continue doing that.

> This in turn means that I should not respond to replies to my comments, as they rarely get to 8+.

To me this is the biggest negative. A useful but non-controversial threadlet between members towards the end of a submission's life is IMO beneficial to the community overall but will be worse for average karma for participants.

I'll live with the lower average karma if it means still benefitting from the community in a way average-karma-targeting replies don't.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853658

Would it be possible to include both karma and avg. on the top bar or simply chose which one to display. I like the karma on top for 2 reasons:

1. When your karma goes up/down, it's a good indication that you might have replies to your most recent comments.

2. Karma seems to be updated not so frequently.

I like the idea though of encouraging a good ratio vs total karma.

I'm not keen on the total karma display. I take your point that it's useful as a vague reply indicator, but it would be more useful still if there was an actual indicator of new replies, in the style of Reddit's red envelope. I don't know whether such a thing would be feasible for HN.

I would like to see total karma disappear altogether, because I don't think it measures anything helpful and may well be counterproductive. Looking down the HN karma leaderboard[1] you can see a number of users with very high total karma but very low average karma. I'm sure that some of these users make a valuable contribution, but some seem to post a vast number of very low-value comments that are rarely replied to and receive only occasional upvotes. I'm not sure that we want to encourage that style of participation.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

"You can see a number of users with very high total karma but very low average karma. I'm sure that some of these users make a valuable contribution, but some seem to post a vast number of very low-value comments that are rarely replied to and receive only occasional upvotes."

I comment in a lot of new stories/links that pop up, especially people asking critiques because a) it's disheartening to post something about your work and have zero replies and b) I often get to see a cool product that's in a very raw stage and hear feedback from the creator themselves. In fact, I'd say less than 25% of my comments are in front page links.

But often these new stories rarely get traffic. And my comments will usually just get one or no upvotes at all from the creator, despite their thanks for the criticism.

Just saying that not all low-averaged scores are people not actively trying to make a contribution.

I quite like the total karma display. It gives me something to aim for. In the past few weeks I've made an effort to post in threads rather than my usual lurking and I'm using my overall score as a crude means of whether or not I should be posting more. I'm trying to go up by about 100 a week, which focuses me more on commenting early in the life of a thread and engaging in conversation instead of posting at the end of a thread's life or adding me too posts.

I would definitely love an equivalent of the reddit envelope, along with a view of replies.

Ok, now both are displayed.

Now, if we could only see other peoples average karma .

Total Karma of a user can be seen on his profile page. Afaik there is no way to see another users average karma, unless he is on the leaderboard, which uses total karma as the ranking metric.

Ok, now everyone's comment avg is visible in their profile.

This discourages people from posting helpful comments that aren't likely to get many upvotes. For example,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741408

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485254

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349459

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349455

Those are all comments by me that were helpful to the parent, but which are "punished" by the public display of avg.

More is not necessarily better though is it?

"More is better" is implicit. If the number has no meaning, then why calculate and display it?

I don't get that more is implicitly better. It is pretty clear from a naive glance at the list of leaders that there are diverse average points that correlate to diverse posting styles.

If you want it scaled to fit a continuum of "bigger is always implicitly better", a more reasonable number would be: average of (comment points/parent points)

Even if a number has no [absolute cardinal, > x] meaning, there is still a nominal information value to the datum.

I have an affinity for numbers, as I'm sure many hackers do, but the dual score doesn't look/feel right to me. Might we have the average show up only if it drops below a certain level? Possibly in red, to really emphasize the point?

This could help with another gripe I have with displaying average points (and comment voting in general), which is that oftentimes quality comments are downvoted simply for being contrary to the downvoter(s) views, and/or groupthink.

Thank you. I use the total karma number as a quick indicator of whether or not I am getting replies to an active conversation. That works for me since there are usually upvotes if there are replies to a comment.

Or you could just store the date of the last child comment with the user information, and include that on the top bar (near the average)? So a user knows the last datetime of child comments in their threads.

Personally, I like the average. Shows that HN is more 'adaptive', imho.

ETA. Whoa that was fast. I like the (abs., avg.), fwiw. That does seem best.

Could we have the avg change color slightly when there is a change to the actual karma?

You mean like the (in)famous orange experiment? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467895 and the top thread in it (the one started by jacquesm) makes for a good summary as to why it failed.

they did it already :)

If "consistently good" is what you want, then why not use something similar to a Sharpe ratio? For example, average / stdev.

xkcd suggested a novel way to filter out terrible YouTube comments by playing your comment out loud before posting. It had some very interesting results:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/10/08/youtube-audio-preview/

What's the time horizon for the avg? Does it change noticeably for non-noobs?

pg, I'm only seeing the empty list.

To join in the 'me-too' choir, rather than returning the arithmetic average, perhaps you could slap a confidence interval on it and return the lower bound.

I like it - I'd really be interested in knowing what the mean and median are for the HN community so I know if I'm contributing a lot or not pulling my weight. Maybe a (+0.65) next to it in the top nav or something to that effect?

The current version ("741, 2.41") is nicer. I'm not a karma-whore, but it's nice to know where I'm at.

One feature I'd love to see also, is the # of direct replies to my comments in the head bar. Also, while we're at it, a page listing them all too. That way, I'll know if somebody replies to a comment I made last week/month/year. For example, in 'My dalliance with smart drugs - and the lesson I learned' (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850750), a few people have ordered some of the drugs mentioned, but the story will be dead soon, so in a few weeks, when the drugs arrive, nobody will be able to share their experiences.

One thing I like a lot about HN's lack of comment replies is that a direct reply to one person is an indirect reply to the parent, and I think that's a valuable thing to keep. It saves re-hashing arguments in separate threads.

Yeah, I always go to the 'threads' link in my profile because I'm interested in keeping up with the conversations I was having. An easier way to see new replies would help.

For what it's worth, I hope this gets changed back. Differences in karma tend to alert me to older discussions where something is still happening. Without either that or a Reddit-style notification when replies are made, it's going to be even more difficult to identify the interesting threads and come back to them after the first visit.

That I think is one of the more odd user experiences on the site. The envelope indicator on Reddit is very tiny but extremely useful feature.

As of now, I have to re-read my threads in order to notice any updates.

I came here from reddit (I mainly browse here so it isn't as much of an issue) and was surprised that we don't have reply notification. I spent a few weeks ignoring replies because I wasn't notified of them, now my first port of call is my comments page to see if anything has been added as a reply.

I've written a chrome exension that marks unread comments a while back: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/fpndmkcfggkffpab...

it helps a lot with that. It has some bugs, but as far as I can see I can't get around them because of the markup used here ...

almost all other web boards I'm on have some easy way for me to see responses to old comments. This would be a really useful feature for hn.

I think this is definitely an improvement. Putting any kind of number up there is a game mechanic that will affect people's behavior. My eyes inadvertently go there every time I open the page.

An average does more to encourage the desired behavior than a total does. Even as I am about to press enter here, I can't help but think of whether this post will make that number go up or down.

In that case you are prefiltering yourself in mere anticipation of potential acceptance from others. If everyone did that, no genuine posts would ever appear: everybody would be too concerned about how much others would like them.

I'd argue that in this community, there is a better correlation between up-votes and the quality of a comment than between up-votes and how much one user likes another user.

I'd also argue that there are only a few topics that are so polarizing that people up-vote or down-vote based on the position the author takes, and that the majority of discussions here aren't as opinionated, and that the number of up-votes a post receives is based on how interesting and thought-provoking it is.

However, it appears that how to display karma is one of the more polarizing ones :)

Going to the leader board and sorting the first 20 by average:

  Order	Who		Total	Ave

  2	edw519		44607	22.29

  39	grellas		11208	19

  45	wheels		10752	12.15

  4	patio11		37809	11.23

  42	mixmax		11064	10.45

  66	timr		8632	9.78

  78	chaosmachine	7829	8.8

  93	niyazpk		6885	8.28

  70	alexandros	8353	7.98

  53	jerf		9873	7.8

  1	tptacek		45718	7.49

  16	mechanical_fish	16598	7.4

  17	raganwald	16421	7.27

  97	maxklein	6751	6.68

  34	ryanwaggoner	11976	6.63

  76	_delirium	7895	6.56

  49	lionhearted	10137	6.49

  87	acangiano	7001	6.39

  22	Anon84		14263	6.24

  9	swombat		21933	6.09

  75	abstractbill	7910	6.09

While we're at it with the feature requests, why not add a down vote option to submitted stories? Wouldn't it help get a better signal-to-noise ratio in the "new" section? It would also prevent "throw spaghetti at the wall, and see what sticks" behavior. If this was debated in the past, I'd be curious to hear why it was not implemented.

Management of "karma" in systems like Hacker News is critical to long term success. Watching the community, and the flow articles, in Reddit shows that minor changes in algorithms make a big difference.

One further thought: your "karma" in a site like HN is a very serious asset. Access to a post which reaches the front page can make or break a company. I would easily pay $100 for someone to post a choice blog post reference that would hit the front page, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

We also know about Digg's kabal of a few high-karma individuals who tilted the entire news site to the political right.

People don't game a site until it's important, and you don't find out the effects of your site's algorithms until the site becomes popular.

The owners of a site must be diligent, continue to understand how articles are floating to the front page, and be willing to make changes. We as users need to be supportive of the changes & experiments they make - even at the cost of our own "karma" (ie, real-world-dollars).

I think there are to distinct issues here. The first is how articles find their way to the front page, and the second is how individuals are rewarded (or punished) for their involvement in those stories.

The reality is that the earlier you post in a story, the more karma you're likely to collect. To me, that just encourages "first!" type posts. A poorly thought out comment in a story that makes the front page will inevitably earn more karma than a well thought out comment that doesn't.

So is this about getting better stories to the front page, or about rewarding users for their participation?

I agree that having something on the front page is worth real money (a lot more than $100, in my opinion.) but I don't see the connection between having a high personal carma and getting something on the front page.

As far as I can tell, it's one user, one vote (I mean, except in the common case of dupes) to my knowledge, higher-carma users don't get extra points to vote up stories.

I first thought it was some sort of geek joke since the top bar had my username with the number 3.14 after it. :)

"Ah, the karma point system is broken and they're showing the number pi instead, very funny."

If that happened to me, I would be thoroughly confused. (see my handle)

Weird, mine is at 3.1. Got me thinking that it'd be interesting to know what the mean or median karma rating is, and if by some weird coincidence we are close to it. This information is of no value whatsoever, mind, but I'm curious nonetheless!

The thing where you can suggest something and find that pg, slaving over a hot REPL, has implemented it by the time you reload the front page is definitely a feature of HN.

Would it make sense to show average karma on profile page of a user too?

(This is question, NOT a feature request, as I presume that Karma at HN serves the purpose of moderating the quality of content, rather than being a redditesque user-stickiness game)

I'm not sure that this will fix anything, but it'll be helpful to me.

I think those of us that care, but occasionally say something bad will be helped a lot by this. I'm always trying to ask myself "will this be upvoted" when posting things, as I'm trying to be as helpful as possible.

However, people that are actually trying to troll or can't tell that they're trolling won't really stop because of this change. I don't really have an answer, either: this is a Hard Problem.

Edit: I should also say that any of us can easily be in the "can't tell we're trolling" camp at any time; it's a per-comment thing, not an "I'm a good poster, what shall we do about those terrible bad ones!" deal.

Another aspect to the average is probably timezone, as this post for example which is being written after what would be the prime time hours when most of the discussion has already occurred. I'm sure over time this would effect average.

I don't so much think average is important, possibly a derivative of it would be average amount of posts to receive down votes. We don't want to discourage people replying to threads that are falling off the front page, even if the only person who sees the post is the person that the post was in reply to, that still sounds like a net gain if it was useful or made a good point.

I personally will discuss things in the same spirit of information sharing, genuineness, common sense and helpfulness that I have before and after the karma change. I'm new to HN so I don't really even know how I'm supposed to feel about the feedback from the karma. A lot of my posts which I feel are good or important aren't receiving many points, but that's ok. If I really need something, I will ask a couple of my friends who are on HN to look at it and vote it up if they like it.

okay I got my first downvote. Maybe I care a little. Was this to see if I care about my karma? Okay Mr. Downvoter, tell me ... what was wrong in what I said? :)

I feel that if the avg is important, user profiles should have the average in addition to the total.

Adjusting the game? Trying to reduce comments and posts? I once posted a story that got 80 points. Unfortunately, the points went to the guy who posted the same story 10 minute later.

I am sorry for my ignorance but Avg. of what?

Average karma per post. (Total karma divided by number of posts.)

I'm sure it's deliberate; whether it's an improvement or not is open to debate. Personally I prefer seeing the total.

Same. I'm a bit more aware of my karma now than before.

Karma doesn't matter as much to me because I come to the site for content, but I like to comment on a lot of new links (especially entrepreneurs wanting some design critiques) which doesn't get nearly as much participation as the front page and thus has a much lower chance of gaining a lot of karma per comment. A total karma score doesn't discriminate against that but an average score does.

I wonder if this is going to kill the willingness of some people to participate in discussions on less popular postings. Here I also mean the ones that don't necessarily make it to the front page. I'm not sure that everyone even checks to see the new posts. Sometimes small discussions will pop up on those posts.

Can we also get thread collapsing ala reddit? Even just on the first level would be awesome.

Well, hopefully not as insane as Slashdot, where I end up showing all comments, since filtering completely messes up flow of messages (content-wise).

Anyone have a greasemonkey script to hide karma? I started writing one but got stuck on something simple. I'd like to no longer see the score at the top, because the instant HN loads my eyes gravitate towards that spot, looking for reassurance.

This reminds me of the past short-lived misfeature in which your username changed color if you had high enough average karma per comment. The main difference is that, this time, your average karma is only in your own face, not everybody's.

I've been advocating that sites should try h-index: http://www.quora.com/Should-Quora-ever-consider-using-H-inde...

107 comments?!? I can't understand why folks get so wrapped around the axle about these things, especially on HN. Is there some way to monetize karma that I'm not aware of?

If you have a high average are your comments better? Are you bad at commenting with a low average? What should this number tell me?

I just noticed that about 30 seconds ago. I'm not sure if this is intentional

I hope it is not. I like to keep track of my karma because it usually correlates with a discussion below my more recent comments.

I typically watch it to remind me to check my threads for any responses. If my karma went up or down, it's likely that someone responded to one of my comments.

It would be really helpful to have an icon appear on the top bar when there are replies to my comments in articles. Clicking on the icon would give a list of articles/threads where there are replies, easily openable into a set of new tabs. Re-loading a single article would remove it from the list and when the list would be empty the icon would disappear.

Don't worry fellas, I think it's just a trial to see if it makes the quality of comments/submissions any better.

Just keep on using the HN like you normally do, write insightful comments, provide utility for your fellow hackers.

You can still see it on the profile page itself.

feature, modified by PG based on another thread (this one, i think: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852560)

Karma is like the star stickers that children get in kindergarden.

Karma's a bitch.

Be scared. Be really scared.

No.

Sorry. Halloween fail :)

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