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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that Reddit would be better without displaying karma. What value does it provide except to create a perverse goal for some people?

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They very first version of Reddit used spark lines instead of points. People hated it. We experimented multiple times with removing karma from the equation. It always reduced engagement.

People just really need that dopamine hit of seeing their points go up.

Honestly I prefer the way HN does it, where only the submitter can see their own points.

In hindsight, maybe optimizing for engagement also optimized for polarization?

You're probably correct, but what product owner is going to take the chance on purposefully chasing lower engagement?

Hacker News. :)

Ad-supported business can’t solve this problem.

Considering that this is also the biggest problem regarding youtube, you may be right.

However, if it's true, the consequences are terrifying, if you take into account that engagement is directly tied to the financial success of every company whose money comes from advertising.

(And here it is: yet another reason to despise advertising and surveillance capitalism...).

EDIT: typo.

Well, engagement for the sake of karma is likely not a worthy engagement, I would consider reducing that sort of engagement a good thing. Surely it's not a black and white matter though.

Without having seen what kind of content really gets moderated, I'd say HN got a good balance.

I can see that; there are literally thousands of people "farming karma" on Reddit every day. It's definitely engagement but I don't necessarily think it's healthy engagement. Unhealthy engagement is what this article is all about.

Measuring engagement seems a bit like Goodhart's law.

Unless you can show healthy engagement clicks more ads than unhealthy engagement the people who pay the bills won't care what kind of engagement you have.

>It always reduced engagement. Exactly. All these companies optimize for "engagement," regardless of how vapid, destructive or banal it is.

When all the advertisers and investors care about is clicks...

This is also why cancel culture is a thing—pressuring advertisers to remove funding is the only input we really have to what goods and services our society produces.

I miss being able to see up vs downvotes per post. With only the total displayed, it feels like only the hivemind opinion wins out.

> People just really need that dopamine hit of seeing their points go up.

In other words, people are naturally vain.

It’s hard to notice those who don’t care.

> Honestly I prefer the way HN does it, where only the submitter can see their own points.

FWIW lobste.rs has another interesting take: it doesn't show points on comments until after a while and then they become public.

I have figured out the reason is to avoid vote piling while keeping transparency.

I've often wondered about a reddit like site that just egregiously and unapologetically showed fake metrics to make it look like people loved your comments and read them, regardless of the truth. You might have to do it a bit randomly to keep people guessing or enjoying the tension, but just make a large chance of hitting the karma jackpot from a comment slot machine - it might make people feel happier.

What about a variant of shadowbanning?

You can't see your real scores, but everyone else can.

This makes sense to me, perfect sense. Removing metrics would reduce engagement, and that's all that matters.

Or better yet, make getting karma data a paid, rate-limited feature. 99% of people would not be willing to pay for it, but the data is there (for a price) if you want to crunch numbers or looks for trends. A "karma tax" if you will.

Getting not giving? I'm pretty confused here - wouldn't most people refuse to pay and be stuck at whatever the limit was before the first payment was required? That might cause an even weirder effect where having that level of karma was considered the "maximum genuine karma" and just lead to a much lower requirement when it comes to farming likes to boost views.

I'm saying hide everybody's comment scores kind of like HN does.

However, if you pay $1/mo for access to the karma API you can then have access to the comment scores. That's all. People can still upvote/downvote freely, they just can't see the scores unless they pay.

Hrm, interesting... so it'd be less a product for common folks to judge others and move it almost exclusively into the realm of a thing to support advertisers who are hunting for "influencers" - interesting.

It provides sentiment without clutter. Instead of 1000 identical comments or 1 comment with 1000 "same" or "this" comments underneath.

You could still do that if the karma wasn't displayed.

How do you envision this working?

Sort by karma, but don't display it.

How does that solve the problem?

I don't mean comment karma, I mean user karma.

Hmm, are people really looking at their total user karma?

I admit that seeing my comments get upvoted gives me a hit of dopamine, knowing that that number of people were interested in what I said.

However, I never look at my TOTAL karma, just each individual comment. I like knowing that THIS thing I said people agreed with.

I never look at my own karma either but then I'm also not actively trying to increase it. But reddit users do tell us themselves that they post things specifically for the karma. They also do things like post screenshots of threads instead of the threads themselves to get the karma from those posts.

There is a whole host of behaviors on reddit around acquiring user karma.

For individual post karma, I'm the same as you.

Even the ability to up or downvote I think takes away from the incentive to provide good discourse. Some people are content just down voting a perfectly reasonable argument rather than contributing to the conversation and having to reason out their opinions. You even see it here, where posts are greyed out but no one has given any reason why.

I don't have a better way mind you. Unmoderated discourse tends to end up bad, and voting is a form of self moderation. The alternative of fully staffed moderation also has it's issues. Community building online is just a hard problem to solve.

Just removing downvotes I think is a good step. Because if someone just agrees you aren't losing much by them upvoting instead of posting "me too!". But if someone feels like they disagree and want to downvote, that could be an interesting conversation that never happened.

This happens because people want a disagree button, but have only a milder version of flag button instead. Sometimes one just wants to support a viewpoint without bringing additional arguments.

I think it would be better to display separate agree disagree and flag counters on each post, and not reduce karma if there are more disagree votes than agree.

Maybe adjust the cost of upvoting and downvoting. So a downvote to a reputable commenter might cost 10 or 100 karma. Upvoting might also incur a cost. Maybe it should depend on the reputation of the post (post karma) or the poster (reputation) and also it should cost people with more karma more to vote (but not linearly).

As a side-effect it would allow real-time insight into a sliver of online virtual economics.

Stackoverflow "charges" you one point to downvote. You recieve 10 points for an upvote, which are free.

I think simply adding "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons and separate "off topic" or "downvote" button would make a big difference. What "up" and "down" means is a bit vague and everyone has a different opinion on the matter. I will readily upvote comments I agree with but I usually only downvote comments that add no value to the discussion rather than being something I disagree with. So even my own voting pattern on HN is asymmetric.

Maybe how slashdot used to do it (still does it? I haven't been on there for a while, but not because of moderation)...

People who had good standing would get N 'moderation points' that they could use, and you were allowed to mark N comments as being good or bad (with categories for which type of good or bad (e.g. insightful, funny, interesting, etc))

Most of the time you didn't have the option to moderate, so you can't just downvote or upvote, you have to reply.

However, I am not sure if this is actually needed... most of the comments that get downvoted SHOULD be... they dont contribute to the conversation, and replying to them just feeds the trolls.

Removing downvotes to have only positive reinforcement is, IMO, a bad idea - there are things that are incorrect, misleading, offtopic or offensive that we deem do not contribute to the discussion. The HN karma system (when the topic isn't political) helps to push more interesting insights on the article or question to the top of the board.

Currently there are three actions that can be taken, upvote, downvote & flag. Since these actions are never actually defined (AFAIK) I can only report my interpretation flagging is something I maybe have done once for an openly hateful comment, but I mostly never do... I generally downvote when a statement is thin (without being amusing), redundant (common knowledge), FUD (probably a regurgitated false talking point) or off topic. This doesn't mirror my upvoting, my upvotes tend to focus on: insight, interesting question, well founded argument.

I am a bit sad your comment has been downvoted as, while I don't agree with your idea, it's an interesting thing to consider and it seems to be suggested entirely in good faith.

I don’t have a better way mind you

I do

Get rid of votes entirely. All of it.

People might start reposting stuff they think should be more visible. You'd have to do something like 4chan's /r9k/.

It's a problem that only gets worse at scale, too. At least with decentralisation, the problem is distributed among multiple instances and moderation teams.

I proposed it on HN for HN, to mixed reviews. A common sentiment was “if you can hide the counts from yourself, why should you be permitted to hide them from me without my consent?”. Still, it looks like the world is catching up to my idea. Hooray :) I continue to hope HN braves the ire and tries it out some week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267

I've never looked at mine and I never look at others.

Arguably a-socially, I treat each post and response as a discrete pair and gain pleasure from the depth of thread which follows but only ephemerally.

Maybe karma is best self assessed?

The value is there, but it goes to the company and not the users.

> a perverse goal for some people?

Its not a perverse goal.

Racking up "Internet points" is not a perverse goal? I don't see how it provides value to either the person attempting to acquire these points or the visitors providing them.

> I don't see how it provides value to either the person attempting to acquire these points

It obviously does. correct? why else would be they be doing it if it provides no value to them.

That's begging the question. People do a lot of things that actively harmful to themselves and others -- my argument is that purposely acquiring karma, for the sole reason of increasing one's score, could very well be one of those things.

> People do a lot of things that actively harmful to themselves and others -- my argument is that purposely acquiring karma, for the sole reason of increasing one's score, could very well be one of those things.

You are making a random and unsubstantiated claim that acquiring karma is somehow "harming" the person acquiring it. Onus is on you to backup your claim.

Why would one assume that its obviously true.

> That's begging the question

I would say your point is this.

"Begging the question is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion"

My original comment was actually asking the question: what value to the user does acquiring karma provide?

You begged the question by saying that acquiring karma must provide value because people are acquiring karma. That's the assuming the truth of the conclusion.

I'm not strongly making the claim that acquiring karma is harmful but I'll re-iterate my original question: what is the value of acquiring karma for either the person doing it or the audience? My unsubstantiated feeling is that provides no value but I'd be interested in hearing a counter-argument.

The problem is that we have clear proof that people are motivated to acquire karma since... people try to do that thing. You could possibly shift the question over to the topic of "Is being motivated to acquire karma a positive or negative utility - perhaps, does the user acquire karma as a goal, or acquire karma to avoid not acquiring karma for their comments?"

> What value does it provide

Many people cannot form an original opinion. A vote count makes that decision for them.

I'm not talking about vote count, I'm talking about individual user's karma counts.

Doesn't everyone benefit from the fact that there are people obsessed with finding content that appeals to them? It's like reposts: what do I care? Though I suppose you could argue this is good for their mental health.

And I'm not convinced it would even have the tiniest impact on a polarized circlejerk like r/politics.

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