The biggest problem I see is that it will discourage deep exchanges which are one of the most valuable phenomena that occur here.
Forget commenting on anything that won't hit the front page.
Also forget commenting later on in a story when it gets stale. Best to hit a hot story when it is fresh and a lot of other people will be piling on later.
That's the point, guys. If the karma/colored system didn't affect user behavior, it wouldn't be there
Another approach would be to normalize the comment's score against the other comments on that story, and use a threshold on that. If there were 4 comments with karmas 1 to 4 and another story with 100 comments from 1 to 100, the 4 on the first would be just as good as the 100 on the second. That might be too much work, though ;)
comment karma / min (1, max (story karma, 10)
But your normalization idea might work better.
It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
Make it take thread age/traffic into account too. I don't want to worry about posting in dead or near-dead threads.
Overall, though, if we can figure out how to implement this without discouraging good commenting, it could be a pretty nice change.
My biggest problem with the system as it stands is this: there are two HN posters who I think of as exceptionally insightful, prolific, and committed to the maintenance of the community, and one of them doesn't have a highlighted name -- I assume because he's posted a lot in low traffic areas. That's a major bug.
But if there does start to be a problem, it will certainly be visible.
However, as you note, I decided "ehhh" and still replied to you right here anyway ;).
The new system actually encourages me NOT to comment on less active threads, because it's going to hurt my "average score."
I for one think this is a good move, though the best part of the recent change is not so much the username highlighting, but the capping of negative karma at -8.
Referring to the recent thread where I was being seriously downmodded, with this cap I probably wouldn't bother defending myself (and creating all that "waste of space"), because -8 or -16 is not all that much karma.
Thanks!
I think this makes the comments more compelling, and helps us to get to know the other users a little better.
i completely agree. it might explain this in the guidelines, but it needs to be written right where people evaluate. maybe the first time someone votes they get a pop-up with the vote guidelines, kind of like sudo. it pops again once every two months as a reminder.
it's really hard not to see voting as opinion tallying rather than comment goodness. that's what voting is used for everywhere else.
Also, consider that people so concerned with karma that they would be dissuaded from participating in a worthwhile discussion are among the least likely to have worthwhile discussions.
In the end I don't think it matters much either way - the really fun conversations you do for the sake of talking, not for the karma. But this system still subtly discourages those sorts of exchanges, which is a pity.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138275
What he was replying to is deleted. But it doesn't matter what it was. pg objected to "filling up comment threads". I didn't know they could get full...
You can't maintain he's fully supportive of long threads, and also wants to avoid noise and clutter.
Out of curiosity, have you ever stopped a conversation just because it was getting exceptionally long? At a certain point does that mess up the table layout?
You further ridicule the comments you disapprove of as "yes-i-did-no-you-didn't" style comments, knowing that isn't literally true in some cases.
PS YC and searchyc are both very slow for me. It's hard to find anything. If I could just search for posts by pg with certain keywords then I would give you better links, but I can't.
That's the kind of thing that pg is talking about.
Please note that your accusations against me are covered under this, so can be safely disregarded.
No doubt you will complain that I am arguing pointlessly. But I think this is fun, and that my comment is true. It is logical that if you admit to posting badly, then your claims in that very post shouldn't be accepted.
So, anyway, why did you ban xlnt and qqq, but not this account?
Edit: Usually that's how the software catches multiple accounts belonging to the same person, but I went back and looked, and in this case you (as qqq) outed yourself as curi.
edit: Oh. I've outed myself lots of times...
What's weird is, why are you still thinking about this? It was weeks ago. Life is very short.
I am not the only one who remembers some of these things. pg does too; he linked back to a time he punished me for having fun. Personally, I find it interesting, and I enjoyed this thread. I have an ongoing debate with a friend about how email lists should be moderated, and this stuff is relevant. And I got to see interesting attitudes like SwellJoe's. I didn't predict a reply like that.