High submission volume + no comments or hundreds of one-liners = might as well set up a news aggregator.
The point is, from a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments.
EDIT: Ha, points to jwecker for posting about SNR while I was writing about it.
1. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" queue than average, because they spend enough time on the site to exhaust "top" and want to read more.
2. They're more likely than average to be open-minded about controversial stories as well as less tolerant of inane ones. If they spend more time on the site, then it's more to their advantage to promote interesting stuff rather than promote an agenda. It's dumb to piss in your own pond.
Here's what I propose: high-karma users get more voting power over *young* stories, to enable them to police the "new" queue and out-muscle spammers and voting rings. After stories are a few hours old, high-karma users no longer get a boost if they haven't voted on them yet. If high-karma users have already voted on a story when it reaches the aging threshold, the boost goes away for upvotes but not for downvotes. That way:
1. Bad stories never see the light of day, because high-karma users bury them and they stay buried.
2. Controversial stories will make the front page, but they don't stay there long if the rest of the community doesn't like them.
3. Good stories make it to the front page slightly faster.
Still, though, any statstical approach (which is what I assume you're using) is going to have some lag because you have to wait for a statistically-significant sample. You can catch any given offender after he's caused an O(1) amount of trouble, but if the offenders don't correlate with each other, you can get overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of them. Spammers certainly do correlate with each other, but it's not obvious that voting rings do.
If there is a constant flow of karma, it's much easier to see a differentiation in comments. There's nothing more irritating to me than seeing a comments board full of great thoughts and lots of responses where everything is either 1 or 2 points.
[upd] - and, of course, the old slashdot rule- focus on modding up- have a very good reason to mod down. Sure wish the digg community had followed that rule (back when I still used it).
I like how you put it because I've always thought of "karma"-type points in social networks as money -- social currency. We want to stimulate the "economy" by having an active exchange of karma through the community, encouraging more and more discussions and contributions.
python_kiss's comment about limiting karma is also an interesting thought. Inflation is something to ponder about in this analogy.
Inflation matters when you factor in time. Inflation encourages risk. It makes your current savings become less valuable in the future, encouraging you to try to increase your wealth to compensate. Too much inflation encourages too much risk, and you get a bubble.
Money is valuable because it can be exchanged for scarce resources. Karma is valuable because it gets you attention, which is a scarce resource. There are two kinds of attention: visibility of articles and visibility on the leader board. Karma is the cause of the latter, but only a byproduct of the former. There are a fixed number of articles on the front page and a fixed number of spots on the leader board, but both become more valuable as the community grows, because more eyeballs means more attention.
At this point, the money analogy breaks down. Money is both a unit of accounting and a medium of exchange. Karma is only a unit of accounting. It tells us how wealthy we are, but we can't exchange it for other wealth. Attention doesn't behave like a commodity either. If we give and receive the same amount of attention, that's not the same as simply doing nothing.
So, news.yc really doesn't behave anything like a conventional economy. If any analogy can be drawn at all, I'd say that we're in a state of deflation. As long as the community continues to grow, producing articles now is less profitable than producing articles later.
Anything that can be done to encourage this feeling of intellectual discourse is a win, in my opinion.
I do see your point, though, wrt top users not spamming the site. That's largely why I liked your idea of throttling submission rates based on karma. New users should have to develop karma by being useful, rather than just prolific.
I know I suggested it, but throttling submission rates based on karma might not be fair to the end users. Once a karma-archy is established, the rich will get richer at the expense of the poor.
One solution to older users having a perpetual advantage would be to implement some sort of aging of karma, or at least of the karma value used to determine throttling. Such a thing would actually be a win in terms of SNR--it doesn't really matter how karmic someone was a year ago, if they have only made low-quality posts/comments in the past month, they should be treated (in the submission system) as a low-karma user.
The problems, of course, are that there is some fixed point, and also that news.yc may not fit the growth model that makes the above true for a community like Reddit--and that may be a good thing.
Points, or karma, could be rewarded based off a ratio of useful contribution to total contributions instead. Such a system would encourage a user to make sure his contributions to the community are good. This would be beneficial implemented in any crowd-generated news site.
While not another news aggregator, our project is addressing similar types of issues in other channels. I am loving the applied relevancy to here already.
I'll probably never get around to supporting bold text in comments either, for the same reason.
To some extent news.yc is protected by being about a topic only a small number of comparatively smart people care about. With any luck we'll never have the full-blown trolls you find on general news sites. I have some ideas for solutions if trolls do start to appear.
I've joined well over 50 social networks and what I've noitced is that freedom to choose appeals more to people than the right choices already made for them. More features, more niches, more startups, more choice. Users might complain about features, but fundamentally they like choice.
The more time a user spends making choices on a network, the more loyal he or she becomes. You don't spend 12 hours of your life customizing your profile if you don't plan on sticking to it.
Lastly, too much of anything is bad. The state should have control over medical supplies, education and energy. But beyond that, it should trust the consumer with running the country.
1. Ignore it
2. Downmod it
3. Write a quick reply
4. Write a thoughtful reply
Option 4 is ideal, of course, if you have the time, but you usually don't. Quick replies are what we want to avoid. That's how flamewars start. Ignoring the post is going to be unsatisfactory for the flamewar-prone. That leaves the down-arrow as a sort of relief valve. So I think its presence can actually reduce nastiness.
I suspect the ability to successfully transition from this honeymoon period to moderate popularity will become a defining battle for a certain class of social web start-ups.
If you want to jump into the community here, esp. if you've already been lurking for a while- don't do it by doing a submission (unless it's a killer submission)- add some nice comments please!
What we want to avoid at all costs is what happened at Reddit yesterday with the impeachment business. That's no good. I know they're working on it (spoke to them last night) but it was annoying there for a while.
Incidently, the project I'm working on relates to this in many ways.
On YC, it sometimes helps to simply sift through a user's past posts and comments.
If you concentrate on the top of the new page and like a submission and mod it, it will get exposure near the top of the top page and get some real good input usually, so that's the best place to start- just look at the 3 or 4 submissions at the top of the page and spend a few minutes.
Nevertheless, there are some amazing submissions that because they don't get a point in their first hour of existence (because everyone is eating lunch or busy submitting their own etc.) end up moving clear down the list without anything. If you want some good karma (the real kind) spend time with the 4 or 5 at the bottom of the list giving belated deserved credit for some posters.