[a7776f88862]

> I admit it's very counterintuitive or almost subversive these days to suggest that internet points be kept secret.

Media popularity rankings are toxic for everyone but distribution middlemen and advertisers. They turn what should be heterogeneous markets for content producers and their audiences in many different niches (geographic area, interests, subcultures, etc), into a global winner-take-all popularity race in a single market (owned by the distribution middlemen, like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc). The kind of market where every seller is ranked by a single metric and only the top few are rewarded makes sense for things like professional sports, but very little else.

[skinnymuch]

Which of the two groups of people are benefitting from Hacker News showing metrics? Stories show points and total number of comments. Anyone can see anyone’s total karma. And you personally can see your comment karma.

YouTube and and other social media would still get advertising and such without public metrics since you could give private access to them when trying to make deals.

So overall I don’t see how either groups of people mentioned are benefitting much from HN showing metrics.

[a7776f88862]

> Which of the two groups of people are benefitting from Hacker News showing metrics?

That is a bit of a nonsense question. Neither benefit, because there is no advertising on HN, and HN is not a media distribution business. HN is an online forum, and the original point of post ratings on forums was crowdsourced moderation. The point of online forum moderation is to remove spam, trolling, kooks, and other things that waste your reading time. So moderation is a strictly negative system. Using post ratings for online reputation is what turns it into a positive system.

IMO online reputation based on upvotes is a game with no winners, only losers. Problems include gamification and addiction, groupthink, privacy risks (it is very easy to correlate bits of information to deanonymize pseudonyms, the persistent use of which the point system encourages). What's the benefit? It is much more valuable to focus on the moderation aspects. The problem with online communities today is keeping out spam, trolls, kooks, idiots, and other bad actors. Modding down inane and ignorant postings so that they don't waste people's time is much more valuable in keeping forums interesting and relevant than another 10 upvotes. "Harmless" but useless and time-wasting posts will drive participants away and erode the community. That is the one of the lessons of Eternal September.