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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Actually it is not anonymity that makes Reddit (or HN) successful. It is pseudonymity. You still have an identity, and the identity has value - karma. It is just disconnected from your biometric, "real life" identity.

The desire to protect the value of the pseudonymous identity is a powerful motivating force for making positive contributions. In many ways it is even more motivating than for your real life identity, because your real life, "biometric" identity is so precious that you will almost always favor low-zero risk contributions which are incredibly boring.

If Reddit was only anonymous it would be a horrible failure.

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4chan is anonymous. Last I checked, it wasn't a horrible failure, and in some ways actually works better, since there's no "karma whoring"[1].

The Japanese equivalent of Reddit (2channel) is enormously successful, possibly even more so than reddit, and it's anonymous.

[1]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karma-whore

Easier to read, all around better source of information: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Likes

Yes they just need to repair the karma with a tag system. So for example a user might have multiple karma values: karma-aww=2, karma-gonewild=1, karma-actual-content=1000, etc

You'd have a much better site!

Does this require different "types" of upvotes? If so, this kind of idea runs counter to sites like YouTube that have figured out that even things like 5-star rating systems are more complicated than users want to deal with.

At that point you're voting something 'cool' on Yelp.

In fairness, 5-star rating systems are often useless anyway. People either like something or they don't. Who goes "Wow, this is cool, but ... only a bit cool."? Whereas being able to say "This is funny." or "This is interesting." has a much higher value to effort ratio, I think. I guess my issue is that you say "even" 5-star ratings, which I generally consider to be one of the worst voting interfaces, so I'm not surprised it doesn't work.

Completely agree - most ppl won't rate. The ones that do either are interested or not interested. If even a small fraction of the ones that do rate, rate something in a category, say karma-aww+=1 then algorithmically one could classify things pretty easily.

I don't think it requires that. The system can keep track of which subreddit the karma points were received in and display them accordingly.

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