In my opinion, we want people to keep quiet until they have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation. The idea that making any post is a "return on investment" is nonsense.
In my opinion, we want people to keep quiet until they have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation. The idea that making any post is a "return on investment" is nonsense.
I rarely open my mouth. There was a short period where I looked to snipe with some witty comment, but I quickly out grew that.
I've made one post and I am rarely finding things pertinent to the tribe that haven't already been posted, so instead I look for new interesting content here and only open my mouth when I think I have something valuable to add to an existing discussion.
I think something like the proposed solution would leave a user like me out in the cold. I am by no means saying this objection should kill the idea, you gotta break a few eggs, and if I happen to be one of them, so be it. It should be given some thought though.
(If I were changing HN, I'd love an option to replace the karma score with a reply inbox, so I don't have to poll my threads page. I'm trying to break myself of my post-and-run habits, of my general fear of defending my ideas, and of my overvaluation of karma.)
I think the submission makes an incorrect assumption that valuable users contribute regularly. Certainly regularity isn't baked in to any karma measures on HN right now, and I'd expect that's be design rather than a flaw to be corrected.
Since Reddit is open source, I could create a copy right now that would have no content on it. Lets say I populated it with all of the old, highly rated posts. This would be valuable as a source of high quality content, but has less value to me because it lacks current events and interaction with other users.
I said 'somewhat' because there clearly is a value in having high quality content, so I see it as a trade off. I think there's a market for both high-quality/low-volume sites as well as lower-quality/higher-volume sites.
Those OP measures don't account for that, I think.
dx is the number of days the user is registered. If the user made one post and then stopped, his karma score would shrink over time as dx approaches infinity while the numerator remains constant.
The numerator technically has an extra term for each successive day, but it looks like that additional term is 0 if no comments were made on that day.