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Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#31

Post by gaika »

kashif wrote: post #19
gaika wrote: post #2

Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric: For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.

How is it possible to know whether you fit into a community by looking at your Karma, especially if you are a newbie. If you aren't a newbie then you are already participating or observing the community anyway. To illustrate another subtle point. Lets, take your karma and compare it with mine and compare mine with someone like nickb. Now what conclusions can I draw about whether I fit into this community.

Easy, you just have to take time since you've joined and # of posts and comments into account:

I can see that you joined a year ago but didn't gain much karma. That means that you're an old timer, but a lurker, who doesn't post or comment often.

nickb and other top 10 karma users define this community and they lead by example.

I joined just recently, because I somebody posted a story about my startup and I had to comment. But since that I've been posting stuff that people care about.

All this is visible by looking at the profile of the user, without knowing exact posting history. This is huge time saver for everybody involved.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#32

Post by kashif »

concealed wrote: post #29
gaika wrote: post #2

Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric: For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.

The principal effect of karma here is not how it helps you judge your fit, but how it actively shapes the community/content. This effect was clearly visible on reddit as it was realized that the more sensational content was vastly more promoted in the reddit karma system. So my question: What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery…

Hmmm..A better ordering system might improve things but I am not aware of any simple alternatives.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#33

Post by xenoterracide »

brlewis wrote: post #27
xenoterracide wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. that's why it IS funny, 'cause it's true. It's sad too, though. If pg says anything he gets at least 50 points for being pg. The rest is because pg is actually smart and doesn't usually say dumb unthoughtful things.

pg's median comment score is 4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166110 More people read pg's comments, so he does get more upvotes than the same words would if coming from someone else. However, to say that you can mention pg in a comment to get more votes is neither true nor particularly funny.

wouldn't mode or average be more useful?

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#34

Post by gaika »

concealed wrote: post #29
gaika wrote: post #2

Yes, I care, as a form of trust metric: For the person: it is a simplest way to see if you fit or not in this community. For the community: quickly judge if the post or comment is spam or not.

The principal effect of karma here is not how it helps you judge your fit, but how it actively shapes the community/content. This effect was clearly visible on reddit as it was realized that the more sensational content was vastly more promoted in the reddit karma system. So my question: What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery…

Take a look at my startup, we're trying to push a different system for ranking stuff. I personally think there's a lot more value in it. But sometimes people prefer simple algorithms that are easier to understand, there's value in it too.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#35

Post by xenoterracide »

apgwoz wrote: post #4

I'd love if social news were more like an RPG where you could "level up" to get more features, customizations and other things I can't think of. Last I knew, users with 250 karma were allowed to change the color of the nav bar at the top.

then we could have karma farming bots :P

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#36

Post by concealed »

brlewis wrote: post #27
xenoterracide wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. that's why it IS funny, 'cause it's true. It's sad too, though. If pg says anything he gets at least 50 points for being pg. The rest is because pg is actually smart and doesn't usually say dumb unthoughtful things.

pg's median comment score is 4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166110 More people read pg's comments, so he does get more upvotes than the same words would if coming from someone else. However, to say that you can mention pg in a comment to get more votes is neither true nor particularly funny.

Median score is not what's being discussed. It's quality vs score. Those individual comments that are of completely average quality and yet have phenomenal scores are the most telling.

Also very telling: score velocity over time. For example, if `joe` makes a good point with factual grounding and is getting lots of points. Then `bob` replies in disagreement and bob provides almost nothing to back up his position. Then suddenly the points reverse (joe goes negative and bob gets lots of points) just because bob said it it must be true and everyone blindly agreed. There are ways to measure this impulse response that would provide more concrete numerical measurements.

Median score... there are so many effects that would cause this to not relate to comment quality that that is pretty useless. For example, just commenting on more active topics can give you a much better median score.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#37

Post by icey »

kashif wrote: post #21
jrockway wrote: post #18

I care. Reddit was destroyed by trolls and joke accounts. They get downmodded quickly, but they keep coming back and spamming every article. Even though comments are the main point of Reddit, you get no credit for posting good ones and no penalty for posting spam. Slashdot had the right idea when you were limited to one post a day (or whatever) when your karma got to -10. If you can't write content that other people…

I am sorry, I don't understand your point on how Karma relates to spammers going away and 'joke' accounts not being created, especially if they spammers kept coming back anyway.

My assumption is that reddit only really cares about keeping traffic up, while PG only cares about keeping quality up.

Having karma today allows PG to make changes tomorrow if he needed to take care of quality issues.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#38

Post by brlewis »

xenoterracide wrote: post #33
brlewis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg's median comment score is 4: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=166110 More people read pg's comments, so he does get more upvotes than the same words would if coming from someone else. However, to say that you can mention pg in a comment to get more votes is neither true nor particularly funny.

wouldn't mode or average be more useful?

For most questions I think average would be more useful. For the question of whether people upvote pg thoughtlessly or not, median is useful. If more than half of pg's comments end up with a score of 4 or less, then we can conclude that his comments that end up with 50 or more points are a select subset.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#39

Post by xenoterracide »

jrockway wrote: post #18

I care. Reddit was destroyed by trolls and joke accounts. They get downmodded quickly, but they keep coming back and spamming every article. Even though comments are the main point of Reddit, you get no credit for posting good ones and no penalty for posting spam. Slashdot had the right idea when you were limited to one post a day (or whatever) when your karma got to -10. If you can't write content that other people…

yes but it's too easy to get bad karma on slashdot. I have bad karma on there (1-2 bad comments) and now none see my posts... it's too hard to redeem.

plus their karma system seems less easy to use.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#40

Post by kashif »

gaika wrote: post #31
kashif wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible to know whether you fit into a community by looking at your Karma, especially if you are a newbie. If you aren't a newbie then you are already participating or observing the community anyway. To illustrate another subtle point. Lets, take your karma and compare it with mine and compare mine with someone like nickb. Now what conclusions can I draw about whether I fit into this community.

Easy, you just have to take time since you've joined and # of posts and comments into account: I can see that you joined a year ago but didn't gain much karma. That means that you're an old timer, but a lurker, who doesn't post or comment often. nickb and other top 10 karma users define this community and they lead by example. I joined just recently, because I somebody posted a story about my startup and I had to com…

So you suggest that all people who do not post often enough do not fit into the community. And that posting often is the metric to drive? And because, in our current example, you have a higher karma per day, you belong to this community as opposed to me? But if nickb was to read this comment then you and I might both be trivial?

Finally, as a supposed 'lurker', it might serve me better not to login and just read submissions instead of participating by voting. Clearly, voting and commenting are also measures of 'being in a community'. So as lurkers stop logging in they cannot vote and then voting drops making the submission rankings either volatile or static.

I do not understand your line of reasoning.

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