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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?

#41

Post by xenoterracide »

brlewis wrote: post #38
xenoterracide wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he would get more if our usernames stood out more. but I can accept that I am being grossly inaccurate and exaggerating.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#42

Post by kashif »

brlewis wrote: post #38
xenoterracide wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Submission scores might be a statistically different distribution then comment scores. Also while median is better than mean, it may or may not be better than mode - difficult to tell without looking at the shape of the distribution.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#43

Post by kashif »

icey wrote: post #37
kashif wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, thanks. Much clearer :)

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#44

Post by kashif »

xenoterracide wrote: post #35
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

And a possibility of acquisitions by gaming companies...

Interesting.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#45

Post by gaika »

kashif wrote: post #40
gaika wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subm…

Simple: karma as a measure of your contributions to the community is not perfect, but it is much better than nothing at all. Do you know a better system?

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#46

Post by kashif »

gaika wrote: post #45
kashif wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subm…

Simple: karma as a measure of your contributions to the community is not perfect, but it is much better than nothing at all. Do you know a better system?

That is not a response to the original chain of thought. Nonetheless, karma might be an unnecessary tool for the necessary effect.

Do you know a better system?

Yes, I am suggesting an alternate mechanism which uses only voting on submissions and comments while discarding individual karma.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#47

Post by xenoterracide »

ph0rque wrote: post #7

I had a karma of ~350 until the software glitch at the beginning of the month. At first, I cared, but then I realized that it's not important in the grand scheme of things. However, I would like to get my #CBDDFF top bar back, and have the down arrows available again. Otherwise, it's no big deal :~).

down arrows are the plus.

Re: Ask YC: Do you care about Karma?

#49

Post by technoguyrob »

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…

Did you just say /b/ instead of Hacker News? Those are like as extreme as you can get on the two ends of the spectrum.
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