Show HN: I got tired of stressing about my karma, so I wrote this.
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The only thing I find off about it is the average karma on profile pages. Personally, I find that it subconsciously dissuades me from commenting anywhere that is likely to result in few/no upvotes. My first comment on a story might get 20, 40, 80 upvotes, but any extended discussion is going to be rather nested, and so you're essentially burning through your average as each comment sits with only one or two votes. Similarly, commenting on "unpopular" articles means few people will see your comment, so you're pulling your average down again.
Should karma matter to me? Probably not. But I will confess to looking at people's profiles to see their average karma and time on HN as a way of knowing a bit more about them. I don't think it's unreasonable to feel that the average should be more representative than a straight average of all comment votes.
I don't like to complain without offering a solution, so this would be mine: weight the comment average as a function of the overall points on an article, to allow for more conversation around niche topics. Weight comments according to how deep in a thread they are, to allow more in-depth conversations to occur without a karmic penalty.
Karma can sometimes feel like a superficial way of "keeping score," but I think it serves a valuable role in promoting quality discussion. It still has room for improvement, though.
Can you elaborate?
Unfortunately, it doesn't weight for in-depth discussions or comments on less-popular articles.
LessWrong has a partial solution for this (possibly inherited from reddit). When you log in, you can see if anyone replied to one of your comments, and you can go to a page listing such replies. It is therefore encourages looong threads of discussions, much of which are worth my while in LessWrong.
It is also possible to reply to years old comments.
About the karma end of the problem, one could try to weight karma by the inverse of exposure. Right now, early comments are disproportionately voted up, while later comments can be nearly totally ignored even if they're very good. But that's a big change, easy to screw up (not to mention it may be a bad idea to begin with).
It's not just commenting on unpopular articles and deeply nested discussions that will pull your average karma down, but commenting on old articles.
By the time I find an interesting article to comment on, it will usually be at least a day old. Nevertheless, I tend to comment there anyway, in full knowledge that very few people will ever read my comment or upvote it, because most of the action on HN happens within the first day, and most people move on to the newest articles very quickly.
The way HN handles average karma calculation in such circumstances is pretty sad because of the disincentive it places on people to comment on good older articles, which are often much more interesting and worthwhile than your typical new article.
This problem is compounded by HN's attempts to disallow duplicate article postings (though there are ways around that), and lack of automatic linking to previous discussions on the same article (though manual linking is occasionally done by HN users themselves).
In short, there should be a way to keep productive discussions going, rather than effectively placing a limit of about 1 day on any given discussion.
I hate to praise web forums in any way, but I do think one thing they get right is to usually bring any threads which have been recently commented on back to the top. HN would benefit from a similar approach.
Certainly it's doing its job, which is to keep the signal to noise ratio high.
The only disturbing aspect of Hacker News is the way that valuable contributors can be hellbanned even after only a few comments. For instance, I saw an individual hell banned for commenting on a controversial story: they weren't trolling (which I assume is the purpose of the facility), only engaging in a debate. I suspect that the one who did the hellbanning did it because they didn't agree with what was being said. As there is no review mechanism, this is purely speculation on my behalf - I will never know why this was done!
Isn't this the ultimate form of groupthink?
There are ways of stating disagreement without being nasty, defensive or arrogant. It's a good thing :-) As in RL, thinking before you speak is a wise way to conduct yourself on HN.
Perhaps the saddest example (for us) that I can think of is CPlatypus (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=CPlatypus). Apparently a start up veteran, works at RedHat - I don't know what his blog is. I trawled back through his comments when I noticed he was hellbanned, and they were all pretty insightful. He hasn't been back in the last 30 days or so.
For the record, the hell banning practices are extremely disconcerting on Hacker News. On the original site that hellbanning was designed for, it was to slow down trolls, not those who responded in a controversial way. That there is no way of appealing to being hell banned is definitely a negative of contributing to this site: you'll never know you that you need to change your behaviour, and there is no way of fixing the issue - even if you were an insightful contributor such as CPlatypus.
Anyway, I think I've said my piece on this matter - I don't want to be controversial myself so I'll refrain from commenting more on the practices of those who are in ultimate control of this site.
In this case, hellbanning just demonstrates that HN is run by a private cabal. Whoever it is can run it in their own way I guess, but without any oversight they're likely to ban people for the wrong reason and with no recourse, and doing so doesn't contribute to things like voting quality.
gasp! /s
I've found that if I spend a few minutes to justify my belief, and approach the discussion as that of peers rather than assuming my opinion is all that matters, things go very well, even when we disagree.
So yeah, HN does have an element of groupthink: that those who are disrespectful are not welcome here, regardless of their opinion. Most likely, their opinion can be found in other comments but written by someone that is looking to engage in an adult conversation and not out to belittle or insult the rest of us.
On HN, the submissions run media hot (since submissions can only be upvoted, not downvoted) while comments run media cold. (where logic and reasonableness are much more highly valued than in the submissions)
That's an excuse that unprofessional people use to try to excuse their poor behavior. It's the same problem that "brogrammers" are having when they offend people with their "tits or gtfo" attitude. Just to be sure, I'm not intending to imply you are like these people.
And don't confuse HN's brand of entrepreneurs with rebels. They are far from rebels. They are playing a well established, very old game. Their attitude is not a result of the rebellion against any system (they are playing within the system), but rather the very simple fact of where they came from and their upbringing. The common entrepreneur is professional, polite, and intelligent. They aren't pretending to be a rebel. They are starting a company.
While I applaud your ability to read past the rude comments, the simple fact is, this is a discussion. And rude comments are meant to be that: rude. And many people here want to promote civil discourse, not rude, emotional, immature outbursts.
Not everytime though. Especially in topics like Microsoft/Apple/Google, the moderation is brutal if you don't fit in the groupthink.
A big example: http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN from being submitted as a story(if you do it will show up for you, but actually it's killed so won't show up for others at all). What crime could the site have possibly committed to deserve such an extreme banning(there are no instances of other tech sites that I know of getting banned, can you give me any?).
Post complaining about the banning: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408883
The answer is simple, the site is of Microsoft watcher, insider and enthusiast Paul Thurrott who posts breaking news, analysis and reviews with a sometimes positive slant. That is enough for some "enthusiasts" of other platforms here to flag it to death and ultimately to hellbanning. I am guessing someone who innocently submits stories from there regularly will get their account hellbanned to, for not conforming to the groupthink on here.
This is just the visible tip of the iceberg of the groupthink which downvotes comments and flags any legitimate news that doesn't conform.
You think the point in this post is just a figment of the author's imagination? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3663447
Another example of legitimate news getting flagged to death:
How long before Winbeta is hellbanned from ever appearing on HN for being a Windows-centric news site?
Just because you haven't experienced this does not mean that others have not constantly been downvoted for their (non disrespectful) opinions. I believe that's behind their defensive "I know I am going to get downvoted..." lines.
No doubt. Hence my careful phrasing. =)
> Just because you haven't experienced this...
I have. But even then, if I take an honest look at what I wrote, I find I could easily discern how it comes off as me acting the part of an asshole.
You post several examples (of which many are merely people complaining about downvotes which aren't contributing anything meaningful and should not be encouraged), but really, they mean anything. There will always be exceptions, but they only prove their is no groupthink beyond being respectful, intelligent, and contributing to the discussion.
> I believe that's behind their defensive "I know I am going to get downvoted..." lines.
Honestly, if someone spends more time writing "I know I'm going to get downvoted... HN groupthink... go ahead downvote me but you know I'm right..." then they do putting thought into their comment, I will down vote. Stop worrying about little arrows, and just be polite, post intelligently, and contribute.
I think that's what he's trying to do!
These days, anything mildly controversial or disagreeable gets downvoted to death, often without any response at all. In those cases, asking for some sort of cogent response only gets you more downvotes...
I'm wondering if this kind of social pressure is preventing the less confident people to express their respectable opinions.
I think the karma system as it stands now is problematic because of how it simply enables the generally grumpy crowd of HN to fuel their own overgrown negativity.
A simple "I Like This" without any count would be enough IMHO.
Or at least a simple rule that you can only down-vote if you write a positively karma'd comment to the post you down-vote.
It won't be able to make good comments (I hope), so it would have to monitor pages that have been cited often and submit new things as soon as they pop up. Any other options?
In theory this means that people only downvote for "doesn't belong on HN" or perhaps "blatantly factually incorrect" posts, rather than "I do not agree with this posts".
HN does have some protection against "voting rings" - so a script or a bunch of friends that all vote for each other probably would be caught. I don't know any of the internals.
I like your idea about only allowing downvoting if you can create a coherent post about why you're downvoting. But the most blatant trolls don't deserve any comment.
The intention was that maybe, but is it true in practice?
> But the most blatant trolls don't deserve any comment.
Old-school individual "killfiles" would do. As it is now some people seem to be locked out of HN by a crowd of anonymous people. It seems to me that the current system is a bit naive about the goodness of how high-karmas act.
* User tagging
* Un-hellbanning per user (Find someone who has legitimate contributions yet is hellbanned? Restores their posts to a normal color and moves their post closer to the top in a thread)
* Ignore text lightening for downvoted posts
* Hide post on flag or downvote
* Popups on username mouseover with profile page info
* Custom CSS (why not?)
* An "ignore karma" switch. Hides comment thread vote arrows, ignores hellbans and text coloring, hides all mention of points anywhere on the site.
* Ignore option, hides all posts by a given user"Don't argue with idiots. They drag you down to their level and beat you with experience"
It's better not to engage in the first place.
Now I have no idea whether you're downvoting me or not (other than the position of the comment relative to others), so hopefully there will be less stress and aggravation from here on :)
Add a "you've been banned, try again" notifier.
Now in all honesty I think something broke it last year because it used to show, but I've forgotten about karma and it just lets me focus on the content and context of the post.