[krapp]

I've felt for a while that HN would be much improved if vote count and karma were invisible. If you give users a stat, you're encouraging them to gamify and optimize for it. Personally, I would rather there was no karma at all, but that's not going to happen. It serves its purpose by affecting the sort order of the thread - it doesn't need to be visible to do its job.

The value of gaming the frontpage could be reduced by having random items from below the fold bubble up from time to time, and perhaps by also having popular items bubble down. Not only would this encourage worthy but not necessarily popular stories to be read, it would (more importantly to me) encourage users to notice that there is more than one page and those thirty slots to read. I believe lobste.rs does this.

It also occurs to me that some people find stories through /comments, and this page can also have an overcrowding problem when multiple comments for the same story take up most of the page. More stories would be discoverable there if comments were grouped by story instead of individually.

I think /active should replace or sit alongside /new. It would provide a nice contrast between the stories getting upvotes and stories getting comments.

[Loughla]

I believe that the incentive to optimize votes/Karma has very little to do with the actual Karma count. I believe it is mostly about driving a narrative or page-views for income.

Focusing on Karma as the outcome is vastly underselling the power of sites like HN (and especially reddit). Those who want to warp the system don't just want numbers on this site. They want power over crowds or money for their business.

[krapp]

Nevertheless, having actual numbers there provides (by design) a form of operant conditioning, intended to encourage posters to want their numbers to go up, not down, and to associate a posters' credibility with their karma score. It might be a minor issue overall (as the effect of karma would be the same either way) but not having the numbers there at least makes the forum less obviously gamified.

As an obvious example, tptacek is sitting on 200k+ karma right now. What purpose does that number serve to anyone? How does it make the site better? I don't think it does at all.

[Loughla]

So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?

I would argue that the content of submissions stands on its own compared to the total; I've not once checked a user's overall karma before voting.

And it's still not on point. The point is that for the people we really need to worry about, it's not about karma at all. Get rid of karma, I agree with you. It serves no real purpose.

But, the problem of gaming the system will still exist - it's all about money. I can drive views to my site or product without karma.

[krapp]

>So, is your argument that, because tptacek has 200k+ karma that its comments and submissions are upvoted more?

Not necessarily, but I would argue that the karma score is there to suggest that his comments should be treated more seriously in general, since karma is meant to be a signifier of 'quality.' It's an easy (and deceptive) metric to determine who in any argument should be listened to and who shouldn't. Although his having that much karma might mean his upvotes and downvotes count more which to me would be a bigger problem for the fairness of the forum in general.

I would be happy if Hacker News got rid of karma entirely, but that seems unlikely. The next best thing at least would be to just not have the numbers there at all.

[tptacek]

My comments are absolutely voted up way more because of status. Some of it is unavoidable: there are people who follow my comments, just like I follow 'patio11 and 'rayiner, and so my comments get statistically more positive exposure.

I think the post/propter is swapped here, though. I doubt I'm voted up because of the silly number. I think the number is silly because of the reasons I'm voted up.

I agree: I'd like HN to get rid of karma. We got past the point where karma stopped being funny and became embarrassing for me several years ago.

[marrs]

I think you're absolutely on the money and I think your suggestions would really help.

I'd like to add something: replace the down-vote button with a "report spam" link.

The one thing that makes me rage on HN is seeing people getting down-voted for having a disagreeable opinion. It's supposed to be to suppress trolling or spam, but people just can't help but use it to oppress others' opinion. Just on principle, it makes me angry, but for practical reasons it's irritating as well because it becomes harder to read often more interesting comments.

[aout]

Well, if you hide Karma but still use it in the ordering of the thread then Karma could be derivated. In a day you could extract the data from the posts and build a kind of karma-book with top users etc etc...

[krapp]

Roughly, perhaps - you could obviously tell that one thread is more popular than another because it's on top, and maybe in some cases determine that one poster has more karma relative to another based on the way a thread reacts when it's known that they downvoted (since I believe but may be wrong that downvotes from higher karma posters are weighted more._ But factors other than just karma determine the sort order of the threads, and where stories wind up on the front page. How much can you really determine on a site with as much direct moderation as here?

[malka]

reddit like : apply a random modifier. It would probably leak data, though.