Ask HN: Do social sites with karma need a decay function?

I'd say, that if anything, down-voting should count proportionally to your karma. If you've got 5k karma, you could go on a flaming-spree for days, and still have more karma than the best newcomers.

That said, I don't think it's that big of a problem. When I (and it's seldom) look at a users karma, I always look at it in relation to created-days-ago. Karma 100, created one month ago > karma 200 created a year ago.

I know that my participation in this board was a deliberate exercise in community building. I worked my tail off in trying to find interesting material that my fellow hackers would enjoy reading. It's pretty common for me to spend 20-40 minutes crafting a response to a comment.

A number of us were upset at the downfall of Reddit, and we were determined to make this a better place. I was one of those. And, while I still use a highly curated form of Reddit for news. I never participate in discussion there.

So the leader' karma scores reflect how much we've invested in this site. I don't think that's a bad thing. People on the leader board have made this site what it is. And, they're still the backbone of the site. Can you imagine what it would be like if nickb or edw519 stopped submitting? It would dramatically change the tone of the site, since their contributions to it are so substantial.

I know that I haven't been as active the past few months, but that's because school's done for now, and I've been building product. With any luck, I'll be launching by January. We'll see.

But adding a decay function to a site like this would only punish people who have contributed lots.

Maybe a better answer would be to increase the size of the leader board to the top 200-300 karma. That would give some recognition to the people that are putting in more work on the site, gut their karma isn't on the top 100. Just a thought.

Elders a.k.a old people in a normal society are respected because they have been in the 'system' longer, irrespective of their accomplishments. That to me is one form of karma (Age)

Also, ppl who have accomplished a lot irrespective of age are looked up as role models in the society : the form of karma that most social sites capture - contribution.

Similarly bad acts reduce one's karma - independent of the good he has done - Hans Reiser comes to mind.

The total karma could be a function of (age, +ve contribution, -ves). The age can be based on some condition like page views/logins done etc. - passive contribution OR can be unconditional too (today - creation date).

Active contributions can be also be classified into major and minor. Say a particular post generated > 1000+ points. It has to be given importance irrespective of age. Smaller events can be dampened - just like in the real world - no big deal. Same goes for -ves too. murder != pickpocket.

my view, karma = function (age, major +ve, minor +ve, major -ve, minor -ve)

and only the minors need to be decayed.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I don't participate on Perlmonks. There are a lot of people there that have "been around forever" and answer questions as though it's 1999. I really enjoy reading the "don't use Moose, it's bloat" threads from people I've never heard of.

Anyway, karma decay would be good for Perlmonks, IMHO.