The conversation moves too fast for the points (karma) to matter. I can't see how this would work.<p>Comments drop off as the conversation continues, removing any relevancy to the points. You can't "hold" highly-rated comments because they'll end up out of context.
Not really sure what to make of this. It's a bad implementation[0] of a chatroom with up and down votes on each message. I don't like the idea of real time karma. There is enough discussion about why something is up voted or down voted when you are constrained by the slowness of a forum system.<p>[0] Bad because of the way the text wraps if the lines you submit are too long and it requires the use of http. There is only one room, etc.
How about using the voting to change font size?<p>And if every user retained a unique id (maybe by using the IP), then the voting would change their font size for every post. And the voting would go back to 0 over time. eg. 1 point an hour.<p>And limit any ip to 1 message a second. And block double posting.
There is something interesting there, not sure exactly where or how this fits in. Not sure exactly what purpose the ratings serve. It is not like a particularly good comment stays on the screen very long. There is something good here and there is something missing, I just dont know exactly what that is.
Hmm I actually see no meaning of karma in this form.
I think at first only the upvoted messages should be seen, acting like a condense of the room slowing down the feed.<p>Then if someone wants he could zoom in to view much more at the same time until he reaches the level of "every message in real time"
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Also you should decide if this karma would upvote the user or just that individual message. (sorry I couldn't decide which one because of the floods)<p>Btw this remembers me of my "zooming feed" idea for merging together top news and most recent feeds in facebook, where one could always go deeper in lesser trending news of his friends.<p>Edit: Still better trying out then me who just thinks about his ideas and maybe post them in comments.
The single best improvement you could make right now is to ban a user based on IP if they exceed a certain amount of downvotes over a period of time. That would at least fix the spam problem.
there's something brilliant in here. it's not there yet, but it's a really neat idea. keep hacking away at this, you're on to something cool. and ignore the overconfident naysayers, this is really interesting and new.