I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.
The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.
Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)
Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing.
Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)
* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
- adjusting to other comments on the same post doesn't account for timing
- adjusting for time after the post is gameable by necromancers
- adjusting by the total karma of the post commented on is incomplete; it also needs some relation to the time lapse from posting to comment
- penalizing short comments might help discourage snarky one-liners
Are there browser plugins to give an adjusted average karma score this way, yet?
Either their comment is useful to you where you live today or its not. You don't have to justify your judgement by yet another subjective.
(By a... checking... 3.4 karma/comment user who was sub-1.0/comment last week; not having changed his opinions or commenting style.)
In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.
I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.
For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
; Ignore the most recent 5 comments since they may still be gaining votes.
; Also ignore the highest-scoring comment, since possibly a fluff outlier.