Ask HN: Do you care about your HN karma? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you care about your HN karma?

32 pointstextread86 comments

Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

Absolutely not. In many contexts of discussion, I view loss of fake internet points as a good thing. For example, hop in a time machine and go back to HN circa 2016 and start blathering about how SQLite is the ultimate, final database solution for 95% of technology products. Seeing that point total go backwards was very empowering to me at the time. Today, this is a textbook karma farming crop.

I also make a point to thoroughly review any comments that are dead/flagged/nearly-invisible for any controversy that is otherwise in the spirit of this community. I'll happily vouch for every one of those, even if there is some consequence to my account standing.

Link? A 2016 comment where you laid out the arguments for SQLite and were downvoted for it is something I'd find impressive.

He must have done it on a different account.

No results for bob1029 under https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483315141&dateRange=custom&... and I'm not about to dig through the 9000 comments about sqlite in 2016.

Since that account only goes back to 2017 it would have to be, yes.

>Absolutely not.

Downvoted. Just kidding, I can't downvote. I do care about karma, but only to reach the level at which you can downvote, only to subsequently prove the promise I made to myself to never downvote anyone on HN.

Losing karma, no. It's more that comments get basically invisible after just a few downvotes. So posting anything unpopular just feels like a waste of time.

Keep at it sir, some of us are using the showdead userscript. Your radical opinions are worth a consideration, atleast for me.

I turned on showdead for a while but it's so often unnecessarily mean comments that I turned it off. I got no value from seeing the dead comments.

That's the point of voting systems. They create or fake the appearance of community homogeneity of opinion by making well articulated wrong-think that might challenge the status quo not worth the effort.

I half agree with this, but I think the problem lies with the people downvoting for extremely pedantic reasons or a misunderstanding.

There is value in having pure drivel or outright false/hateful information hidden from view. It serves no purpose.

This is the age old problem of every site with a social aspect though. I don't blame HN.

As someone that rarely shies away from speaking my mind, even if it's unpopular - I would say just wait it out...

There's an extremely vocal and downvote happy minority of users on HN that try to force everyone into agreement or cowardice. They will change language definitions and weaponize them against you, or try to turn you into some sort of monster for having differing opinions. Basically anything to silence opposing opinions.

There is also an extremely quiet majority of users on HN that do not wade into those conversations out of what I presume is fear of the brigade or just being exhausted from it all... but they will support your arguments via voting (the only tool at their disposal).

So... just wait out the extremists and allow the normal users to judge the quality of your arguments for what they are. Over a several hour or day long period, you will have a more accurate representation of what HN actually thinks about your arguments. It will be a roller-coaster of ups and downs along the way - that's normal.

Stop caring about the points and start caring about the quality of your arguments or unique perspectives you can communicate. Stop downvoting simply because you disagree, and start downvoting for poorly crafted, provably incorrect and/or poorly communicated arguments.

Speak your mind, no matter what it says. HN should be a place for open discussion from people of all walks of life unified by a loose commonality of a love for technology. It should not be a cesspool of unidirectional thoughts - and those who remain quiet contribute to that just as much as the brigade.

IME anything that's not Reddit-esque banter, trolling, etc. is never really 'unpopular' so much as it is controversial - comments that I notice get downvoted usually go back up too; then down again; where it ends up is perhaps more a function of where it happens to be when interest in the thread waned.

I don't 'care about' it as a score, but I do pay attention to it as an indicator that maybe there's some reply/discussion going on and I should check /threads. It's also a slightly scary proxy for time sunk into HN, I suppose!

Not particularly. The closest thing to a benefit for gaining karma is the ability to downvote others at 500, and even then that's not very useful unless others join in.

Personally, I wish that downvoting wasn't an option at all, since its only purpose is to potentially hide opinions you disagree with. Sure, the purpose is SUPPOSED to be about keeping discussions relevant, but we all know that's not what people use it for.

> since its only purpose is to potentially hide opinions you disagree with

People can certainly use it that way, but I think it's useful for de-emphasizing irrelevant or inflammatory comments as well.

"People can certainly use it that way, but I think it's useful for de-emphasizing irrelevant or inflammatory comments as well."

This is my problem with it, that is mainly used to hide other opinions. Even flagging gets abused for that.

I want to read other opinions, but what I don't want to read are lowe effort crap comments. They can and should be downvoted into nothingness, but downvoting well written out opinions is something I strongly disagree with.

Also doing my part to discourage inane comments like "awesome".

> but I think it's useful for de-emphasizing irrelevant or inflammatory comments as well.

Isn’t that what flagging is for?

yeah but that's an extra click and a page load to get into the comment to flag it, so unless it's particularly egregious I'll usually just downvote and move on with my life. Which I think is the right design.

A comment can be thoughtless or shitty but not rulebreaking.

I browse with showdead on permanantly, and I normally find that things that have been downvoted to oblivion were truely for spam or inflammatory/bad faith. That's not always the case, but it is definitly the majority I see. Unpopular opinions I normally find stay near 0.

It's not perfect, but I do think HN tends to actually behave decently with respect to downvotes (and I think needing 500 karma to do so is a big part of it - you have to spend the time and get familiar with the culture first)

> we all know that's not what people use it for.

I'll volunteer myself as an exception to "we all know". I've never thought that downvoting was meant to be used to express disagreement, and I rarely see it being used this way. But I do sometimes see a chain of comments where at least one commenter is clearly misreading / misunderstanding their conversation partner, and getting downvoted for this might feel like getting downvoted for disagreement.

Yes and no.

I care about making sense. Not always the case :)

People agreeing with me, not so much.

But even if I'm going to say something that few agree with, there are ways and ways of saying it. I'd rather choose the one that doesn't atract downvotes. Not because of karma, but because it's the right thing to do, both online and elsewhere.

Karma is a "gamified" way to learn something.

No. It's totally meaningless. Once you gain the ability to downvote, what's the benefit of more karma?

It's so arbitrary too, because you can easily pump up your karma by submitting an article that gets a lot of upvotes. That has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

A little bit, along the lines of:

  - okay, so this comment has positive karma, which suggests that the overall sentiment towards this point of view, technology or approach is favorable
  - hmm, this comment resulted in negative karma, which suggests that it might be something controversial, perhaps this view needs to be re-examined and not held as strongly

Public opinion isn't all, of course, but if I were to suggest that every application should be serverless with no room for variety (just an example), then such a comment would most likely not have too many proponents, possibly prompting me to re-evaluate whether that's a good stance, or whether there's more nuance to it. Same for discussions of self-hosting, or containers, or programming languages or anything, really.

Thankfully, people here actually share interesting details even about the things that they agree with, or provide constructive criticisms a lot of the time, so there's many learning experiences to be had. In that regard, I haven't found many better communities.

I don't really care much for losing karma, but perhaps that's because most of the things I say aren't that controversial, or are offered in a relatively grounded manner. At worst, people might just not care and I wouldn't learn what others think or have experienced.

The amount of Karma you can lose per comment is capped (-4? -5? Somewhere in there), and the ability to downvote goes away after 24 hours, so no. It effectively can only go up over time.

You'd have to be intentionally trolling in multiple threads constantly to get it to go down by any significant amount. 'Cause even if you have a divisive comment, as long as it's not trolling, it will usually end up at 0 in the long run as people upvote it after the 24 hour mark.

It's shame posting limits or comment/post throttling is not clearly communicated and we have to only guess, for instance I am pretty sure the cap is even lower than shown, you can get downvoted into oblivion and not just -4, which stops you from commenting since then some severe posting limits are imposed. Not sure how can you then provide counterarguments when there is bunch of people brigading on you and you are supposed to discuss with them when they just decide they downvote you and limit you to what 5-10 comments per day, then whole point of discussion is meaningless and it's no point even try to exchange opinions when you know how it will end up.

I like it as I have the ability to do a few things after certain Karma but I don't think about it when engaging on HN because I want to be authentic and myself. I do refrain from certain things that are more reddit-isque like sarcasm, jokes, low value comment etc and try to keep it focussed on the topic at hand.

Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

For the most part, no. For quite some time I've had the mindset "You can't buy anything with this karma, and I have more than enough to spare". That said, it seems to be human nature that when you present somebody with a number that can be interpreted as a "score" that we get attached to trying to increase it. So I don't like when my "score" (karma) goes down, but I don't exactly lose sleep over it either.

Also, like somebody else mentioned... I have a tendency to pay attention to it more near certain increments. Like if I was at 33974, I might start thinking "Hey, I need to get it to 34000 even" or whatever. Not a huge thing, but it does crap up now and then.

crap up now and then.

Damn, can't believe I missed that. s/crap up/crop up/

Yes I care about my Karma. I earn it by saying thoughtful and supportive things and I actively spend it to learn sentiment on something controversial.

Great way of stating my opinion on it as well. I will also say that out of any site that I post on, I take the most care here. I try to always ask myself if I am adding something worthwhile to the conversation and more importantly, do I have enough background to speak to this topic. I might not always hit that mark, but I would bet that 1 out of 10 times I go to post, I re-read what I wrote and realize it hasn't hit those marks and either don't post or delete immediately. I value my time and I don't want to waste the time of others.

I don't care about my karma, and I have no problem in expressing controversial opinions. However I also tend to provide information, and that means that even controversial opinions do well in the karma lottery.

The last thing that got downvoted very much was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33285050. People don't like criticisms of Asimov apparently.

But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33110738 is an example of something I would have expected to be controversial, which was instead well-received.

Only until I got to 500 and unlocked the down vote button

no, i hide the karma count with ublock and will discard the account if it unlocks the special reward threshold, 200 i think it is here.

in pirate times the fun of making someone walk the plank was to convince the victim to jump off himself with a little sword prodding as a disincentive to getting back on deck. I intent to just get a new plank each time instead of jumping into a watery grave "by choice".

At about 20K I realized that I was largely posting only when I could contribute to an echo chamber. I decided after that to only defend unpopular ideas with merit, and the process of rational good faith argument. It gives me so much anxiety sometimes that I go back to comments that are getting upvoted too much to add details or nuance to my opinion that will reverse the trend.

I only care about it because I've heard it unlocks features like downvoting, but I don't participate enough for it to matter anyway

Downvoting can be useful in case there is a post where you want to read every message carefully, eg a post about something you wrote. The only way I know to ensure I read every message carefully is by voting on every message (either up or down).

Not even a little bit. There are many comments I've made that have been ratioed, and that's fine. Not everything I utter will find broad agreement or be correct. I think being willing to engage in interesting conversation carries some element of risk, and if you are unwilling to take that risk you will suffer a bland and uninteresting life.

I do actually care about my karma, I'm fine with taking downvotes for my opinions that might go against the grain, so long as the downvoter follows it up with their reasons and an actual discussion can take place.

I know myself though I have been guilty of reacting poorly to a mass downvote spam so as much as I hate to admit it, I do care about the karma.

I think people should care about it a little: if your posts are generally negative karma there's a good chance you're confused about what we're doing here. But it's fine if it goes down sometimes, especially if people are downvoting you for controversial opinions.

Personally, it hasn't stopped me from expressing myself, no.

No however my only issue is that comments turn are grey and nearly impossible to read when downvoted; even with "showdead" on.

I understand the need for moderation but I would like to be able to makeup my own mind about a particular argument.

I wish there was a setting I could toggle that would let me read all the comments in a neutral way.

Opinions that go against the proverbial grain get downvoted early here in HN, but most of the time, (see anything that dissents against the dreams of a robotic utopia)(ChatGTP) as long as you are not trolling, people will upvote it once they see it.

Basically, the title "Sr" really doesn't mean what it used to mean.

Until a few days ago, I cared. My New Year's resolution was to join the HN10Karma club. I achieved it early. It turns out to be very anticlimactic.

As I mostly-jokingly told real-world friends who tolerate me despite my working in "tech": my goal was to gain entrance to the inner circle of techbros, and destroy them from within. Did I say that aloud?

Two annoying things about HN karma:

* A streak of no-upvotes that seems like you wasted your time typing all those things. Though that's useful feedback, it's still annoying. I could use such annoyances in additional aspects of life.

* Downvotes when you're pretty sure it's just some people being cruddy. Sometimes accompanied by reply comments that remove all trace of doubt.

Welcome to the club! Unfortunately you'll have to be more specific as to what you're trying to destroy in order for us to monetize its destruction and hit this quarters OKRs.

I think the no-upvotes thing is simply a matter of eyeballs. This site is actually quite small, and a comment with domain expertise in a small niche may go unnoticed or unrecognized. I don't feel like it's a waste, I'm able to share my knowledge, after all.

One change that made quiet and kinda recently is that you can no longer downvote direct replies to your comment (with that same account), which moves the needle on what I'm being downvoted for, imo.

Nah. I regularly get downvoted for expressing unpopular (maybe too realistic, non-US or Valley centric) opinions or by being too ter-se in comments (only read HN on mobile, so catering to some sensitivities takes a back seat to hunt and peck typing).

> Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

"Fear" is an unnecessarily adversarial way to view it. (After all, what bad thing happens if you lose all your HN karma? Do you lose your lunch?)

My take is, "Is this going to make some people sufficiently angry that they will downvote me?" Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes I do, because:

(1) Maybe the issue was debated to death and I'm adding no value. Why bother?

(2) Maybe I can rephrase it to make it less aggressive. Hopefully that will also make my argument more persuasive.

(3) I can see exactly what kind of people will be upset by my comment and I just don't see us ever agreeing. I have better things to waste my time on.

It’s a nice feedback check. I don’t post that often so I usually see how the last post performed when I log in the next day. Usually my posts are met with indifference. But it’s interesting to see the posts that perform highly negative or highly positive.

Except it's not very deep. Did I get downvoted for being too inflammatory, or of being rude, or for making my point poorly, or because there's a logical fault in my argument, or because my point goes against accepted knowledge, or because someone misclicked the upvote button? I can guess, but it would be nicer to know why.

That’s true, comment replies are always better because they give you even more information. There’s still some signal in the upvotes and downvotes, even if it’s simply “the silent majority people who lurk HN generally disagree with this statement”

Indeed, either we should scrap downvote button completely or if you wanna use it, you would need to provide reason for downvoting at least let's say 50 characters long.

Karma is unimportant as long as it stays above 0 - which it has always done in my case.

What is 'important' on this site is the unfortunate way in which moderation is handled, with disagreement being a reason for voting down a post. In combination with the greying out of posts which have been voted down this leads to a rather strong push away from anything that goes against a desired narrative, whatever that might be in the given context.

So, karma, who cares but make sure to have 'show dead' enabled to see past the hive mind. When shadowbanned just make a new account, they're free after all.

Only infsofar as it's a loose measure of how much my contributions resonate with the community. I generally think very highly of HN so if I say something that's widely accepted, that's affirming.

i am sometimes interested when what i consider to be technically correct comment gets downvoted, because it may mean that i have misunderstood something. otherwise, i don't care.

same on stackoverflow, actually.

I only care a little bit. The fact that it keeps increasing despite the fact that I'm in the minority here on more issues than not tells me that the community must still appreciate my contributions at least a tiny bit more than they object to my way of expressing myself. But, as I said, it's a small concern. And potential loss of karma certainly never affects my decision making. What the hell is karma for if not to burn a little once in a while to say things that need to be said?

> Do you care about your HN karma?

I'd love to say no. But at some point (years ago), I started keeping an eye on it just so I'd reach the threshold for the downvoting privilege (1000 I believe). And the habit never went away.

> Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

No. Wanting to see "number go up" has probably made me comment and participate more, given an extra little push when I had something to say but been unsure whether it's worth commenting about.

I do and I spend a lot of time adding value. It used to be possible to hold contrarian views and have great conversations and debates without downvotes.

These days that's mostly impossible.

I really think downvote should come with the requirement of a comment rather than just downvotes as these days they are not just used to push down things that are not relevant but things people don't agree with. If you are forced to explain the downvote at least it would make it possible to have a debate.

Well I think according karma you have enforced commenting limits, so if you comment only ocassionally you won't notice it, but if you wanna engage in discussion and wanna keep discussing then either you have choice of self censorship (not going against HV hivemind) or face posting limits.

Other than that if you are under 500 you can't downvote other posts (which is actually good thing and I wish we would remove downvoting for everyone).

Likely yes...but "meh, it's not worth saying $THING here on HN" is a situation that I doubt I'd care enough about to remember.

Kinda being aware of up/down votes has probably inspired me to dial back a bit on the "grumpy geezer armed with full-auto keyboard" vibe a fair number of times.

I'm much more interested in touching off juicy discussions than I am in karma...but there doesn't seem to be any point system nor metrics for that on HN.

> Do you care about your HN karma?

I take screenshots of the funny numbers

> Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

I have plenty of karma. The most I can lose from any one comment is 5. There’s not much downside to posting things here, which can be a good or a bad thing. Personally I rarely actually get to -4. If you’re articulate and not a jerk to people it’s rare that you’ll be significantly downvoted. Bonus points if you’re also correct.

> Bonus points if you’re also correct.

If only.

Just for fun, sort of like with a car odometer. I have exactly 5999 karma right now, and wish it was 6000, since it'll be fun to see it go over 6000.

Oddly we joined around the same time and have similar amounts of karma.

Ask, and you shall receive. ;)

I want to say no, I don't care about my karma. But I do to a certain extent.

Even though I know it doesn't mean this, I feel like at least it shows I'm not a complete outsider. It's kind of sad, but it's probably one for the biggest "accomplishments" I have.

It doesn't stop me from posting unpopular opinions though. I do tend to edit to ask why it's unpopular if there aren't any explainations.

It used to. There are a few comments in my history where I've made my point grotesquely, or uncarefully, and it didn't land right, and I lost points, which bothers me. Other times, my point simply hasn't been well received. But there's an element of "speaking truth to power", as it were, that keeps me commenting. They can't all be winners.

Some of my highest-quality, well-informed, well-constructed, unemotional comments were downvoted to death in the past. Some of my lowest-quality, emotional, knee-jerk comments were upvoted to the top of a submission. I used to be bothered by upvotes/downvotes, but after all this time, I don’t. They don’t mean anything.

I check karma mainly as an indication that my comments / submissions have been read by somebody. Sometimes I put lots of work into writing a thoughtful / helpful comment, and if it stays at 1 karma, I feel a bit disappointed that maybe it wasn't read by anybody. But I don't care about the karma total.

Hide .score and #karma and be free from what other people think. And while you're at it: make all text the same color, you might just find yourself surprised when you don't get a hive-mind signal about whether something is good or bad.

What's the point of having so much karma if not to burn it in front of people?

Nope. But from experience, I do know that any kind of user-moderated sites or sites that use such karma systems, eventually enforce groupthink of the dominant group through those systems. Even if they dont want to do that.

No. Maybe if the karma was viewable while browsing a thread I would care. But since it's only viewable by going to my profile, most people aren't even going to know if my karma is high or low.

To be honest, yes, in that I'd hate for it to drop. However I've been on since 2009 and only have 309 karma, so I guess I don't care enough to try to make it higher.

I have karma?

As a score or amount, never.

It's only ever slightly annoying when you get downvoted a bunch for saying something correct but that goes against the grain or popular opinion.

Sometimes. I feel good when my post or comment gets votes.

Not really, but it is nice seeing it grow slow and steady over the years. I find it amusing when it drops a few points over a random comment.

Not really. I like seeing the number go up so I know some people found a past comment engaging, but I don't agonize over it.

I like when my Karma is a number divisible by 10 and dislike it when I get upvoted/downvoted that breaks that.

Of course, I'm saving it for retirement!

No, it has not.

I still care about it for this weird reason: I want to be >=500 so that I continue to have the ability to create polls.

Not really. It’s just a number

No, but other things have.

HN has karma?

Would not know if it did

No.

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