Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of complicated and interesting things going on here. I just wish I had more time and data to dig into them.

One thing I have noticed is a consistent desire for the community to "meta discuss" how the board is doing -- much to the annoyance of others. (yes, this is a comment about meta comments, which makes it a meta meta) I'm not sure any of these conversations have kept the board from getting worse quicker or not -- it's impossible to measure something that didn't happen.

There seems to be common "games" you can play on boards like this, whether you're into game-playing or not. Edw519 has a tendency to come up with pithy quips that the majority of readers would like, thereby gaining his comments a lot upvotes. People who comment early get the "pile on" effect.

I know PG has tweaked the algorithm some to combat this, but all it's really done for me is to put rather worthless comments up above more interesting ones, so for me it makes the board less valuable.

At the end of the day, I think 3 things: 1)karma matters, whether you like it or not, 2) people play games with karma, and 3) you can only play so many quality-enhancing games: as the crowd grows outlying players are left with "cheap and dirty" games which work every so often.

What does Karma matter for?

I notice that people care about it and experience consternation about downvotes, I don't yet understand why. In my experience with the site, every comment speaks for itself, and getting downvoted just means a lot of people disagree with you. When it happens in real life it doesn't bother me, I don't see why it would on here.

The thing I'm really looking out for when I browse are the topical mega-comments that appear sometime, usually when someone understands the topic at hand better than the original author. There are only so many of those to go around, so the rest is chatter, it has to be. Everyone wants to talk, only a few people have relavant insight... still true to life :S.

Yeah whenever we've had a meta-chat inevitably people come on and say "who cares about karma?"

That sounds all fine and dandy, but study after study has shown that if you put numbers/points/stars next to desired user behavior it is going to incentivize it. So yes, in theory it shouldn't matter at all, but due to the freaky way people's minds work, it actually matters a great deal.

It's not a logic thing.

The down side is that people rate up and down based on whether they agree with a comment instead of whether or not the comment was well crafted, high quality, and respectfully argued. If I make an off-topic post about how Watchmen was the best comic book movie of all time, that should not result in positive or negative ratings based on the opinion of the readers. Instead, it should be based on the quality of the input.

i'm convinced that direct voting is a bad approach. I've made one social site without them (it uses implicit signals to "rate" posts, comments are just comments) and it helped a bit. People are still assholes when they feel anonymous, but at least you don't get 10 down votes for expressing an opinion about something like politics. That has a strong psychological effect which some people have a hard time understanding or admitting.

What do you mean by direct voting, and what are the implicit signals to "rate" posts? It sounds very interesting, and I would like to hear more. I am going to be creating a rating system soon, and any suggestions to prevent abuse or to accurately increase quality would be appreciated.

direct voting: having an up and down arrow, or a "digg" button. one of my favorite old community sites (half-empty.org) had a buttons for + = -. This was before the term blog even existed, and that site suffered the same problems, and had endless meta discussions about it.

I wish there were a way to send someone a private message, cause I'd give you more specific details. Anyway, the site I built, which gets about 10k uniques a day and has around 200 active users, uses the ratings of posts to sort the homepage and the tag pages. It uses a few different signals like the number of distinct commentors, click throughs, and the reputation of the poster (this is mainly to break ties). It has a decay so that new posts come up, and it also has some safeguards for abuse. For example, users with no or very low reputation don't count in the distinct commentors number so that it can't be spammed, and there are similar safe guards for the click throughs.

Building community sites has been a hobby of mine for years, and I have a bajillion ideas on the subject. Right now I'm working on some bayesian filters for collapsing insulting comments, porn, etc. Fun stuff :)

getting downvoted just means a lot of people disagree with you

Not here it doesn't, or at least it shouldn't. Getting downvoted here means that people don't think you are contributing constructively to the discussion, I'll usually upvote a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, especially one that's a reply to one of my comments.

I feel bad when I get downvoted because I respect the opinions of other people on HN and they tend to use their downvotes pretty responsibly.

I don't think upvotes are quite as meaningful, though.

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