Ask HN: Does karma affect what you write? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does karma affect what you write?

37 pointsquellhorst83 comments

I find myself sometimes thinking about... Hmm will this be unpopular and ding my karma. In my case it seems like HN Karma encourages group think.

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I rarely think about karma before posting, but I used to think about it a lot more. It was never about following the HN group think, though. There is some of that here, but it really isn't comparatively that bad. In general, it just makes me think twice before posting a comment that isn't well thought out, adds nothing to the discussion, or is actually outside of my knowledge. It also encourages people to simply post more respectfully.

As I said though, it doesn't really matter much to me anymore.

And groupthink we have.

It would be a fun experiment if pg turns off for a while displaying the current karma of comments and/or posts. Ranking would still give some hint what is popular, but that would be much more subtle and I think groupthink would be discouraged as a result.

Even funnier, he can split the users in two random groups (one seeing the karma, the other not) and actually measure how groupthink affects voting.

Even funnier, he can split the users in two random groups (one seeing the karma, the other not) and actually measure how groupthink affects voting.

Experiments are helpful for gaining knowledge.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

I wish I could upvote your comment twice.

Excellent idea.

Absolutely. It makes it better--usually.

Karma, the way it is used here, kills off some normal parts of human conversation, such as the making friends-by-agreeing and making mundane conversation part of socialization. From the perspective of a reader, though, those parts of conversation are very dull if I'm not the poster or respondee.

On the other hand, it encourages conformity. You "win" psychologically and karmically by saying things you know everyone will agree with, and you are rewarded with a tangible boost in your score. Granted, many of us try to upvote good arguments regardless, but there's a natural human tendency to regard opinions you disagree with as flawed.

I agree it makes my comments better. It leads me to be more polite and try my best to explain my points so comment raters understand the argument.

By the way, this is the only site that I comment on and come back multiple times to see how people respond. Smartest, most sincere community I have found.

It's interesting that you feel that way. Perhaps it's me, but when I agree with something, I just kind of nod along quietly, and unless I am in some kind of uber-agreement trance do I usually respond.

In fact (and I'll chalk it up to personality flaws) I usually only respond to disagree, or start an argument, or correct a wrong, or basically be objectionable (note, not trolling.)

To answer the original question though, I'm motivated more by starting discussion than karma. I guess that I'm usually expecting to be downmodded when I post (no idea why I feel that way, except that I'm new here,) but if I get good discussion as a response, it's totally worth negative karma.

good question. recently there was a "capitalism as a ponzi scheme" article and i wrote that ponzi had better insight into nature than malthus. i can't see anything objectionable here - just an expression of opinion and an implicit comparison between tim o'reilly's thinking and that of thomas malthus. i got dinged 2 points for this and i just can't understand why. if there was a reason so be it but i dont understand why anonymous negativity like this is part of the system. it has made me hold back from further commenting... till now :)

I wouldn't have dinged you - but I don't think that the comment really added anything. Since as I understand it the karma's supposed to be about improving the SNR that moderation seems reasonable.

If you'd justified why you felt that Ponzi had a "better" insight than Malthus then it would have been a useful contribution.

Yes indeed. I think your comment was too brief. A statement without justification is not particularly interesting to me, and I imagine others felt the same and downmodded you.

thanks that is the feedback i needed; it seems when an online community resonates with you this misleads you to think they would get anything you say. its a kind of projected myopia.

I just modded you up to encourage you to start commenting again.

Remember to make it interesting :-)

thanks - i think im gonna cry

Meh, I was down modded for asking who here likes the writing of Maureen Dowd and Bill Kristol.

Apparently asking that simple question bothered some people.

In no way can you let anonymous up or down modding affect you in any way. It's not like you can exchange your karma points for cash.

Let your honest opinion represent you, not your efforts to stay popular.

Some people just down-vote anything they disagree with despite any merits the comment may have.

Exactly. I think every time you downvote, you owe it to every one else to explain why.

There was a thread long ago about this for those that are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=147098

(And rokhayakebe, I agree, responding is infinitely more useful than anonymous downmodding, provided the response is civil.)

A new feature, perhaps? non-anonymous down-voting?

I see plenty of pointless, off-topic comments that deserved to be downvoted without explanation. But I agree that if you want to downvote just because you disagree, you should probably state your case why. Or upvote someone who already has.

There was a thread about this on HN several weeks ago. In it, pg seems to imply (to me, at least) that the behavior you talk about is just fine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392228

I got modded down for suggesting people should not downvote posts that have merit but that they just disagree with.. but hey :)

Yes, I'm aware of pg's opinion.

who's the arbiter of merit?

The person doing the voting.

I meant it more in the sense of a koan

If a comment gets modded in the forest...

Sort of. I don't make smartass reddit or Digg-style comments here because they seem not to be appreciated. But if you say something relevant and interesting at a website like HN, reddit, or Digg, and you get downmodded, that either means that you were wrong or that the site is full of idiots and you shouldn't be wasting your time there. Either way it's just as well to know about it.

I do think about it, but I never let it stop me.

But a few times I've been surprised (both ways) by the karma score, so either I don't fully know the "group think" here - or there isn't one.

I don't think there is a 'group think'

I've been knocked down quite hard with a karma score and had someone reply to my comment with what I had just said, and get voted up like crazy. And some days I'll get negative karma for something that got positive the day before.

HN is filled with Bipolar people.

I don't think there is a 'group think'

HN is filled with Bipolar people.

Why do people feel the need to continue voting down a comment like this that is below 0? Clearly mikeyur made a mistake (HN could very easily prevent these types of mistakes). Voting it down to 0 seems sufficient.

How do you vote down? Or does that require enough karma? I only see the vote up arrow.

Just like changing your top bar color, it is a reward when your karma goes up.

The level to receive down-vote ability is around 50, I believe.

Changed to 100 by February 2009.

Sorry guys, I guess I accidently hit 'reply' twice. My bad. Don't kill me too much.

"HN is filled with Bipolar people." -- No. You cannot upvote a comment you previously downvoted. HN is filled with people that maintain a variety of opinions.

Man, when something is potentially ironic, it's really confusing whether it is intentional or not. Oh well, I all ready voted as if it were intentional. Sorry mikeyur.

It would be interesting to see if comment karma scores changed by hiding the score from your view before you upvoted someone. That would eliminate "groupthink" because you would not know how many other people voted for a comment until after you upvoted (or waived your right to upvote).

It sometimes affects what I write, but not in a bad way. If I see a comment that I wrote has poor karma, or a critical response to a comment I wrote has high karma, I will often go back and flesh out my argument better.

At least on Hacker News, it seems to be a sign that my comment was poorly written rather than against popular wisdom.

Not me, karma affects nothing, even if you get downvoted -1000 so what? It won't change anything.

If you are worried about karma so much you have a few options.

A) diversify: post more, that way if you "screw up" and say something people won't like, it'll be made up with points from your other comments.

B) deletion: monitor your comments, if you suddenly see that its at 0, quickly delete it. Because it really is a bandwagon, and people will downvote a comment just because it has been downvoted before.

I look more at replies. My goal over the past few years is to learn how to post a controversial argument without getting a ton of replies arguing with something that was not in my message. You can't avoid getting arguments about what was in the message, of course, but it's just wearing when you get tons of flames about something you didn't actually say.

I have found that on a good site, that argument will also tend to be voted up, even if it's against the local dominant opinion, but that's just a side-effect.

I left Slashdot when I could no longer do that, and I felt it was because I'd plumbed the depths of idiocy rather than failing to write my arguments correctly. (You can never reach perfection, of course, but assuming I didn't become radically worse at it over the course of a year, the fact that it become virtually impossible implicates the community.)

Write well, ignore karma. If you're getting consistently downvoted after that, consider that you may not be a match for the community. (And I do mean "consider"; it's not proof, but it's worth considering.)

And yes, karma encourages groupthink, though it doesn't create it. A strong community can overcome that, but the pull is inexorable and continuous. Compared to other karma-based communities I've been in, this is still a ways away from group-think dominance, though.

I try to make a point of upvoting well-written contentious posts which I disagree with. I actually end up upvoting many of the posts I respond to contrarily which seem to get unfair downvotes.

As for the effect of karma on my own actions, I know that I've refrained from posting poorly-reasoned or hasty posts even after I've written them. I try to get citations and other supporting evidence too, rather than just posting an unsupported opinion.

There is a great tradition of elitism and disdain for banality among intellectuals. Think of impressionists circle in the early XXs century, most of these guys' paintings are fetching millions today, but during their lifetime they were poor bastards most of the time. Influential - yes, popular - not. At least not immediately.

It is almost by definition that any fresh and promising idea meets hostility from the masses. But the thinking minority is always ecstatic about it. Good ideas and views are like a breath of fresh air.

HN has been a refuge for new and controversial ideas from the start. Which is understandable, given that pg himself created quite a stir with his view on 'hackers' as artists and on lisp as an abstract essence of any programming language (making it a superweapon in right hands). So people escaped from reddit and digg and came to HN to share controversial or complicated ideas. At that time karma points were a badge of honour.

But then of course in came the masses and HN has changed. Now arguments don't win on their merit. Banalities are repeated ad nauseam and the winner is the one who can capture the crowd's lowest common denominator. HN is not that much about ideas anymore. It is more about commercial promotion and quite a lot about entertainment.

In this environment positive karma should make you worried. I actually quite enjoy getting negative karma nowadays. Of course there is a huge risk of being labeled a 'troll'. It has happened a couple of times. Which I think is as honorable as being labeled a dissident in communist Russia or a non-believer in fundamentalist Iran. Just make sure you are 'trolling' by challenging a consensus while having sound arguments and facts at hand. <sigh> But not many people cannot even read your arguments after they fade to gray under merciless and mindless downvoting.

I think it encourages civility, which is sorely missing on other sites. There is almost no mudslinging and very few comments of the "Great post" variety, no "profit" or "in Soviet Union" memes. It encourages me to think clearer, especially if I have a negative opinion. OTOH it probably discourages the pithy but on target remark.

In Soviet Union, WRITING affects your karma!

I don't mind checking karma results of my individual postings to see which ones fit best into the site culture.

I've been considering karma systems, and I guess I think a two-dimensional system might be a useful improvement. One dimension would be

1) agree or disagree (factually) with this post,

with no impact on the user's cumulative score but display by each post

and the other would be

2) this post is a significant contribution to the community or not,

with the same cumulative scoring by user that now occurs on HN.

Sometimes people want to register disagreement with posts that are good posts for getting other people to think and bringing new ideas into the discussion.

If the disagreement is justified, the user can simply reply to the post to make his point, no?

I think a two dimensional system would just bring clutter to a good minimalist site.

Replying to make clear my disagreement [smile], I'll clarify that what I was writing about is the case when user 1 posts a new comment, and then various anonymous users downvote to indicate factual disagreement, rather than downvoting to indicate that it was a lousy comment. User 1 has nothing further to reply to, because all user 1 or any onlooker sees is a bunch of downvotes. (And since the comment's net vote total is shown, sometimes both downvotes and upvotes are invisible if they cancel each other out.)

I agree with your desire for simplicity. I have the opinion that a voting system that votes both on agreement with the statement of the post, up or down, and on the contribution of the post to the community, up or down, is simple enough to be worth the additional information. Reasonable minds can differ, of course, and I'd be happy to read replies about why this is a bad idea.

I agree with you that some people downvotes others because they don't agree with them, and that's a shame. I personaly downvote one-line-and-2-smileys comments and upvote comments that teach me something.

I really don't feel the need for 2 little arrows, it would just be confusing, and users would hit the wrong buttons, etc.

Instead, we should just encourage the "new guys" to read the guidelines : http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I really don't care about karma. Recently I suggested to regulate market capitalization of companies so that more opportunities are created for start-ups.

I know HN won't like it. But still I expressed my opinion.

It doesn't affect my writing but it does affect what I think of people here. The more downvotes to negative values I see, the more I think this community is becoming less able or willing to communicate.

Intelligent people should be able to use words to disagree. I see how it can be useful to use upvotes for content filtering, but downvoting to negative scores actually highlights those posts and therefore defeats the content filtering purpose.

Greying them out even forces me to take action (highlight the text with the mouse) in order to be able to read them. It's completely counter-productive.

So what purpose do downvotes have? In my view they are either insults or they are a very primitve way of expressing opinion. Upvotes are also a very primitive way of expressing opinion, but they help me filter out interesting content as well.

Since negative scores serve no purpose at all, why would I want to have those posts thrust in my face? To learn that there are a bunch of speechless people who feel good about making a score go from -8 to -9? I already knew that, thank you very much.

I wish there was an account setting that makes all comment scores go away.

It's definitely curbed my "me too" posts as these seem to get dinged. But if I have a content related post I will write it and post it.

It does not affect what I write. I regularly put in comments that are not "up worthy", just small factual additions or musings for further thought (or data responses to questions). Sometimes these get pushed down, I have no idea why, but I do not care.

It isn't karma that prevents me from posting inflammatory or (intentionally) idiotic material.

If I have something to say I will say it irrelevant of how I feel it will perceived and/or affect my karma.

I do find it helps me concentrate on "unstupidifying" what I've got to say though. Nobody wants to see me explain myself 5 times because I couldn't get to the point the first time.

I do think of karma when I post. It helps me keep my comments helpful and not negative, and forces me to think a little more about each comment then I would at a site with no karma system. The sense of community/group of peers plays a part as well.

Yes and no. On one hand, I think it prevents me from saying silly comments that I might not think twice about saying on Reddit.

On the other hand, Reddit also has karma, but I get far more negative votes there than here, not because they're mean/nasty comments, but because I enjoy criticizing some of the stupid that goes on there (uncreative pun threads, etc).

"Hmm will this be unpopular and ding my karma. In my case it seems like HN Karma encourages group think."

I don't see a lot of negative karma voting due to people disagreeing with opinions. Usually it will just hover around 0 if most people disagree. Only when a comment is clearly wrong, immature, stupid, inappropriate, etc will it reach negative values.

Downvoting is a way to express oneself without or in addition to a written comment. More importantly, it is a way to control the culture of the site. If you end up with a negative score it means both: 1) people thought you should be downmodded, and 2) not enough people disagreed with the first set of people.

I say all that to express how irrelevant it is in a larger context unless you are a Karma Whore (I will likely get downmodded now.) Express yourself. Period. Most downmodded comments contribute to conversation I think. And that is really the point of commenting, not to whore yourself out for more points.

Isn't the point of karma to make HN a community? Karma is an important way of demonstrating quickly if a link or comment fits within these norms. Community does not have to mean groupthink and I think HN has avoided this, as demonstrated by so many comments arguing both (or all) sides of an issue. So, yes, I take karma into consideration. Not because I want people to like me, but because I want to add value to HN. It's funny, but think of adding a comment on HN the way I would on usenet, back when the warning about how the post would go all over the world actually meant something.

Not directly. The only two filters I apply to my comments are: Is this self-evident? Is this disrespectful of the community? If the answer to either question is yes, then I try not to post.

I find myself not always using these filters on other websites where the quality is lower to start with. I suspect that goes a long way towards explaining the decline in quality on most social sites (an online version of the broken windows theory?)

No. Or I'm trying to convince me that it's not.

But at the end, I think that's the main reason why I have few friends. Most people aren't interested in real discussions, they get upset if you argue against their view. They take it to personally, they aren't interested in new views, they just want to get their views confirmed.

If you play the game you're inside the group, otherwise you're an outsider.

If karma didn't matter to most posters, the board would not work. The whole philosophy of voting is based on the idea that karma matters, both to the reader of the article and to the submitter/voter.

Now whether or not the board is "working" -- whether or not a simple up or down vote means anything more than a herd mentality knee-jerk response -- is a completely different question.

I don't think it really matters - I try to contribute to the great little community here, provide whatever insight, argument or counter-argument that I can.

The only times I've put in a "I know I'm going to get downmodded for this" are when I'm commenting that serves no purpose other than my own personal amusement. In all honesty, I'm expecting it :)

Karma does not affect what I write at all. I accept that sometimes I'm full of shit and move on. I'm counting on the HN community to kindly point it out to me if I miss it.

I rarely think about karma except ex post, and then mostly after being downmodded. It's amazing and distressing how much even one downvote hurts.

Choosing what to say so you can rack up karma points is just trolling in reverse. Nobody you care about cares about karma.

Nobody you care about cares about karma.

Karma is used as part of the YC-applicant vetting process. http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

You can tell a lot about the users of a site like this from the the links they post and their comments in discussions. There are a number of Reddit users that I know only by their usernames, but I know must be smart from the things they've written. We're counting on the same phenomenon to help us decide who to fund.

In our new online application form, you literally apply through your Y Combinator account, so we'll recognize usernames that have been thoughtful contributors to the site. I'm not saying we'll simply fund whoever has the most karma; that would encourage abuses. But we will be more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments.

http://ycombinator.com/w2009.html

We're more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments on Hacker News. In fact, that was one of the main reasons we wrote it: so that we could get to know people before they applied.

You know, I read that before, and all I can say is that I hope that's just a tactic to get people to be civil and thoughtful on Hacker News, or maybe to drive a bit of traffic. It seems like a profoundly bad strategy for vetting startup teams.

I'm not going to presume if vetting-by-karma is true, but I know that the text you pasted above says nothing about karma except to point out how it is tangential.

But we will be more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments.

I might be wrong, but it seems since the partners of YC are demonstrably rational human beings that they would do more than determine someone's smartness based on a score that could represent one of dozens of different things. It's like determining someone's contribution to humanity based on their savings account balance. I think they know better.

Of course. I once posted something about free software, and got my karma completely destroyed. I won't mention it again.

Yes. If my karma is sufficiently bad, I won't have opposable thumbs anymore. That makes writing a drag.

25 you can downvote

200 you can post polls

250 you can change colour of top bar

But that's not what he asked.

But pointing out these effects shows that certain "rewards" are provided for achieving certain levels of karma. Isn't it reasonable to guess that providing rewards was instituted at HN with the hope to encourage people to think about karma? [ and even more so the reward of improving an application to YCombinator, as an above link suggested? ]

pretty sure it was till he edited the question

I think it took me to get to 50 before I could downvote, although it's possible I've misremembered.

Karma effects EVERYTHING I do.

effects = produces

affects = changes

naturally, i want to be interesting to you all ;p

Not directly. Occasionally, after a couple down votes and a rebuttal, I'll restate my point in a clearer, less confrontational way.

fuck karma. fuck all of you. nothing personal.

Yes.

what good is karma if you dont use it thats what i always say

Reply on news.ycombinator.com