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Do such sites need to implement some kind of "karma decay" system, to prevent the leader-board from becoming more static over time and encourage new users to behave themselves?
So something like +- 1/(1 + karma/2500).
Karma is very important to people online and fooling around with it can cause hurt feelings. After all, Karma is often the only explicit reward that community members receive and is a way of being recognized for being a productive, helpful, nice and ultimately good member.
Regards, WarTheatr
This is only a problem if there are very strong mechanisms in place that encourage/force people to actively compete for karma so that they don't risk losing their status. For instance, if high karma people are given more exposure or special benefits (early access to content; free stuff, etc.), you can bet this will lead to an increase in active karma manipulation. People will simply act accordingly to get better karm…
That said, I'd still be in favor of one, only because "news" is temporal so "old" karma shouldn't be worth as much as recent. But, I'm shooting from the hip here and there are probably unintended side-effects I'm probably not seeing.
That will encourage continual good behavior.
... but this is a bad idea. For one thing, decaying karma is devalued karma. Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust all around us?
But the bigger problem is that absolute value of karma is not that important. The important social signal is in the first derivative. If you make a post that people like, your karma goes up. If your flaming instinct gets out of control, your karma stays constant or goes down. If karma is constantly going down anyway it will confuse the issue. Either you're going to have to do some complicated mental arithmetic to figure out whether or not you suck ("let's see, I don't think I've looked at my karma total since Tuesday, so my karma should have fallen by 10 by now, but OMG I think it's fallen by 14, so I must suck!")... or, more likely, everyone on the site will subconsciously interpret the ever-falling number as a sign that they suck 100% of the time, so everyone will feel like crap at all times.
I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0. That will encourage continual good behavior.
Of course, the reason to avoid putting dead players in the rankings is that the people who prefer watching competitions between living players -- i.e. the majority of fans -- don't want the dead ones cluttering up their leaderboard. But this is the web, not TV, so the solution is simple: Multiple leaderboards. Create a version of the HN leaderboard that only counts the past 52 weeks. Put it up at some URL or other. Then people can decide to use the alternative leaderboard if they want.
Heck, if we want, we can allow every reader to create his or her own leaderboard algorithm. Then we can have big chair-throwing debates about which leaderboard best represents the True State of Play on HN. That is exactly how the world of baseball statistics works. ;)
Given that I have fairly high karma, it's hard for me to claim that I'm unbiased... ... but this is a bad idea. For one thing, decaying karma is devalued karma. Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust all around us? But the bigger problem is that absolute value of karma is not that important. The important social signal is in the first derivative. If you make a post that people li…
Like money which will decay with inflation, or perhaps the regard of people who will be dust in a few decades?
> If karma is constantly going down anyway it will confuse the issue
If that's a problem, the site can provide the 1st derivative (ignoring decay). A bit like music charts ("at number 10, up 5, it's...").
Some sites (perlmonks) already give you an xp (karma) delta whenever you reload the page. A last 24-hours delta would be more useful (again ignoring decay).
Then again, I don't see what the utility of decaying karma is personally. It smacks of "what have you done for me lately". I think it's OK to respect people for past glories.