The Karma system - some thoughts

It seems to me that there are a number of different things that are desirable here at HN.

    Thoughtful posts
    On-topic posts
    Interesting posts
    Informed discussion

It's clear that we want to reward people who provide thoughtful, on-topic (by some definition) contributions.

It's also, I think, desirable to have people generally do gnome-type work: finding cross-connections, remembering things that have gone for those who don't bother to search, flagging repeats, etc. (I tend to do that without thinking because I've spent a lot of time on specialist wikis, there such behavior is essential.)

It's also really useful to find those comments that are "good(tm)" in some sense. That doesn't just mean ones that one might agree with. It means contributions and comments that enrich one's knowledge and, sometimes, one's soul.

The "Karma" idea doesn't exactly meet any of these. It's obviously correlated, but it's one number trying to do more than one thing.

It's a well-known phenomenon that as soon as you start measuring somehitng, people adjust to make the measurements "better". If you measure the wrong thing, you will probably get unexpected, possibly undesirable results. This is especially true of the ICXX (Entrepreneur, Torturer, Inventor, Hacker) types that we get here. ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443182 )

There are, I think, two fundamentals: "Value" and "Agreement". The single value of "Karma" is conflating the two, and always will. I can see no way to prevent that except via culture, and as HN grows, that won't work well.

Some measure of the rate of acquisition of karma might be useful, but there is still the risk that I'll only end up seeing the comment and submissions that the collective "agrees with" in some sense.

In short, usage will emerge, and all anyone can do is try to make the system - whatever it may be - simple, clear, and clearly correlated with those things that are desirable. The current system mostly works, and tinkering might simply make it brittle, and easier to game. Personally, I want to find comments by people I've come to trust, without necessarily agreeing with. My assessment won't necessarily agree with yours, so we end up with a system that has to record individual preferences. I think I know how to do that.

But is it worth it?