Since the last influx of users, I have been thinking about social aggregation systems such as news.YC.
And, to put it in a nutshell, I believe that for communities such as nYC which are, not mainstream, comparatively close knit and somewhat homogeneous, it is possible to improve the quality of the submissions and comments if we removed individual karma altogether but kept the voting system for submissions and comments intact.<p>What do you think?
I care. Reddit was destroyed by trolls and joke accounts. They get downmodded quickly, but they keep coming back and spamming every article. Even though comments are the main point of Reddit, you get no credit for posting good ones and no penalty for posting spam.<p>Slashdot had the right idea when you were limited to one post a day (or whatever) when your karma got to -10. If you can't write content that other people enjoy, you need to leave or adjust your attitude. Karma is a way of making people feel bad enough to go away :)<p>The more people we can encourage to stay on /b/, the better... 'cause I really don't care to read that drivel, but I do care to read what people think about programming-related things.
I had a karma of ~350 until the software glitch at the beginning of the month. At first, I cared, but then I realized that it's not important in the grand scheme of things. However, I would like to get my #CBDDFF top bar back, and have the down arrows available again. Otherwise, it's no big deal :~).
Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric:<p>For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community.
For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.
I don't care about Karma.<p>Mostly.<p>One day I noticed that I had about 180 karma and decided to try for 250 so I could change the colour of the Navbar. After clearing 250 (and changing the color to a nice soothing green vs the default orange), I find I don't really care about Karma.<p>A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon. - Napoleon
I think that people spend a LOT of time obsessing over karma and rankings/ratings.<p>This includes not only obsession with gaining karma, but obsession with how to better measure, display or distribute/earn karma points.<p>What I would personally prefer to see is someone present a valid, (semi)tested proposal for a better system. There have been a lot of threads withe what I personally consider to be vague half-suggestions for "improvement" that don't really articulate how the proposal will make news:YC cumulatively "better".<p>When I'm reading the site or submitting comments or linking I don't really find myself giving a lot of merit to the overall rankings. I'm just as likely to add a comment to a story with a ranking of 100 as I am to a story ranked 1, provided the story itself interests me.<p>Perhaps your argument would be more persuasive if you applied it to some submissions or comments showing how it would affect those items for the overall betterment of the site.
User-wise, I'm more interested in a user's average karma per post than their total karma.<p>Post-wise, I have some gripes with the way karma works, in that your high-value comment can easily go ignored because it starts off at the bottom of a well-populated thread. Which, for karma-gamers, means it makes more sense to reply to a comment with high karma to increase the visibility of your comment rather than starting a new comment thread. And it also means that your average karma per post doesn't necessarily reflect your average value per post.
I'd love if social news were more like an RPG where you could
"level up" to get more features, customizations and other things I can't think of. Last I knew, users with 250 karma were allowed to change the color of the nav bar at the top.
No, I don't like the karma system. It has too much potential to discourage dissent. I like the upvote/downvote system for comments and stories, but keeping track of karma turns it into a punishment/reward system.
No, I think the added impetus to ad value to a conversation that karma generates for some is very helpful in keeping the signal-to-noise ratio at a decent level. Karma certainly doesn't HURT in regards to this and it has the ancillary benefit of quantifying, to some extent the reputation of a given contributor, which, for new users is very useful when it comes to understanding who to listen to.
Earning karma points is not important to me. I could honestly care less.<p>However, that being said, I am more a "consumer" of this site than a "poster." I am not trying to be heard, trusted, or accepted by anyone here.
I think karma is a one-dimensional useless metric, and the only reason it seems to have some value is due to the initial homogeneity of a social news site's user community.<p>I didn't know hacker news added silly features based on karma. How pathetic.