[JoelPM]

The other day I came across a comment on HN from one of the creators of Erlang. His karma is 31.

I just checked the profiles of the top ten people on the leader-board and while I'm sure they are great people who have really contributed a lot to HN, I would give more weight to a comment/posting from the afore-mentioned HN user with karma 31 than any of them. And, to be honest, I don't really look at people's karma so I'm not sure how you would define the worth of a karma point, let alone determine change in worth over time.

[Kaizyn]

It's simple really. If there are only 10 users on HN, then it is much harder to earn 10 karma on a post or comment than when there are 1000 users. Just like with any real world currency, the more there is the less valuable it becomes. Certainly you raise a great point about how limited in value karma is for assessing the worth of an individual's ability to contribute to any particular discussion. Still just as an inflation calculator is neat to play with every now and then, this was an interesting thought exercise - or so it seemed to me. http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

[JoelPM]

Interesting, you're defining "worth" as "the difficulty with which something is obtained." I agree, it is a neat thought exercise.

I was defining worth as "the value that something confers" which may (or may not) be tied to the difficulty with which it was obtained, but requires you to define value, which I have a hard time doing for Karma.