Ask HN: What was the first site to use “karma” voting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was the first site to use “karma” voting?

18 pointsgitgud27 comments

Some of the best sites on the internet use the concept of crowd-sourced rating of content and comments by/from the users. It probably doesn't matter anymore, but I'm interested to know who came up with the idea? Or who did it first?

- Hacker News

- Reddit

- Stack Exchange

- Imgur

- Facebook

- Myspace

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I don’t think slashdot was firs to use crowd sourced rating, but I am not aware of others to have an actual functioning system at a scale of 10s of thousands in that era.

And to be fair, everything2 used the term karma before slashdot. We had the concept of karma, but it was called like modtotal or something innocuous. Nate was working on e2 and we were discussing ideas and I realized the term was way more clear so I did the UPDATE TABLE that day. 98 maybe?

(+1, Informative)

Thanks for the clarification!

As others have said Slashdot was very early if not the first. The way they did moderation, which is very different from basically everyone else, and still unique and interesting.

CmdrTaco did a great writeup on it back in 1999 https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

Among the lineage of web comment sites I'm familiar with, I'm pretty certain it was Slashdot. They definitely had it in 1999. Might have been 1998.

It definitely wasn't Digg. According to Wikipedia, that wasn't even founded until 2004.

Interesting, yes Slashdot is a bit before my time but I think you're right, they seem to be referenced in the [1] Wikipedia article about moderation too.

It also warns about large communities developing a Groupthink mentality. Which is something I've always wondered but could never quite describe, the way communities form a single consensus around what's a good/bad opinion...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation_system

I don’t remember it before Slashdot either, and the founders sometimes talked about it as if it were their own innovation. Not sure if there was any “prior art” they were working from or not.

Not only did Slashdot do karma early or the first in it's regular form and with quite a bit more finesse than most simple up-vote-down-vote, I'm pretty sure they're the very first with automatically delegated meta-moderation:

Given your metrics on karma, visits, etc, to decide whether a rating was fair or not. Again, like moderation, not a permanent role, limited to meta-modding around 5 comments. That was a lot of fun as rated comments tended to be great or awful, the great ones often in an article I hadn't clicked so get to read through something new, and the awful ones quite amusing, Slashdot did have a large subset of trolls that were very smart, sarcastic and scathing.

I think you forgot Digg, the first one that blew up and made karma voting popular. It was not the first one to use karma though, like google wasn't the 1st search engine. But before google a lot of folks didn't even know about search engines... Most concepts on the Web existed way before the Internet anyway.

Digg was just a copy of Fark with a better UI.

Slashdot, including the first time 'karma' was associated with digital influence afaik. Meta moderation and a cap on influence ranking was and still is the Right Way to constrain sunset score-whoring feedback loops.

Probably slashdot. Certainly none of the ones you listed.

Interesting survivor bias represented here. Except for MySpace, these are only extant sites. How many karma-implementing sites have vanished?

Slashdot is the first "big" site I can remember...

But in 1996 or so there were a few gaming sites whose names I can't rememeber who had a sort of negative karma... I remember it being described as a "douchiness factor" a couple of times...

I think the concept of shadowbanning may have existed before slashdot. I seem to remember reading about it in the mid to late 90s on slashdot actually.

Distributed shadowbanning was implemented on Usenet with killfiles.

Don't forget the moose! cm.org

Fair enough.

https://www.b3ta.com have been doing it for around 20 years.

I'm going to say Slashdot as well.

Did Myspace have karma style voting? I don't really remember that.

Also Imgur was BUILT to be an image hosting service for Reddit. Out of the ones on your list it's the youngest service so it definitely wouldn't have been the first in pretty much anything.

Worth1000 photoshop contests site also had karma back in 2001. It was used to ensure fairness in voting and gave more voting power.

stumbleupon can also be considered in this list

I'm guessing digg.

Man, I feel old when Imgur, a yesterday's establishment from my point of view, can be considered a ’first‘ of anything.

While I also believe Slashdot to be the first one (it certainly is the first one to use the _term_ ’karma‘), some two other early communities to check for prior art are Kuro5hin and Advogato.

Kuro5hin was built by Rusty on slashdot's codebase so I don't think it could have been prior

Oh man I haven't heard of Kuro5hin in years. I actually deleted my account there when I got doxed years ago.

Anyone remember imageshack.us?

Apparently it's still around [0] as a subscription service [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageShack

[1] http://imageshack.us/

I meant to add that those sites were just examples, I assumed it had been done before Imgur.

Slashdot seemed like a cool site back in the day...

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