Or what about opening up down-votes to all users again, and then weighting the value of down-votes (karma level) rather than up-votes.
Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
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Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#12Maybe the solution is to let each user choose how articles / comments are ranked. A PHP programmer will just have different interests from someone who has started three companies or who has written a petabyte sort. This is all written in lisp right? Maybe advanced users could contribute ranking schemes and people could try them out. Separately: I'd love to see a ratio of points given to points received. And a separat…
People looking for specific interests , for example PHP / PYTHON would get a better content at the corresponding subreddit on the reddit site.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#13High karma mostly just means you submit a lot of stuff. Age of account is a meaningless metric as well. I like the suggestion I saw weeks ago of just ditching submission karma. When people have no incentive to automatically or manually dump everything Ars/TC/etc publish then the quality of stories might go up. Edit: found the suggestion, it was by Cletus: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788875
Another vote for ditching submission karma. Unlike comment karma, it has no direct relation between quality and score - esp. as there are no story downvotes.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#14High karma mostly just means you submit a lot of stuff. Age of account is a meaningless metric as well. I like the suggestion I saw weeks ago of just ditching submission karma. When people have no incentive to automatically or manually dump everything Ars/TC/etc publish then the quality of stories might go up. Edit: found the suggestion, it was by Cletus: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788875
+1 on making Karma comments-only.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#15Maybe the solution is to let each user choose how articles / comments are ranked. A PHP programmer will just have different interests from someone who has started three companies or who has written a petabyte sort. This is all written in lisp right? Maybe advanced users could contribute ranking schemes and people could try them out. Separately: I'd love to see a ratio of points given to points received. And a separat…
People looking for specific interests , for example PHP / PYTHON would get a better content at the corresponding subreddit on the reddit site.
Even within a given discussion on mongoDB for example, there are just different levels of expertise with system internals.
For example: Upvotes and downvotes could flow through all the posts like a pagerank. So people who like "mongodb good!" comments can see those, people who like "mongodb bad!" comments can see those, and I can see posts that objectively discuss the strengths and weaknesses of mongodb.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#16Is this more trying to stop HN changing and keeping it the same rather than letting it adapt with the times?
The more people that come to HN the more diverse the topics (within the hackersphere). HN will bring up the most relevant to the majority of the users (mostly).
Maybe the articles brought up today are what most of the users are looking for, which is now what you aren't looking for.
Keeping with the old ways, keeps it old.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about karma Avg. then?
>How about karma Avg. then? Step one: Make new account Step two: Post Techcrunch or similar article guaranteed to hit the front page of HN. Step three: Use newfound insane karma average to upvote crap submissions. Step four: ??? Step five: Profit. I actually like "Remove submission karma.". That should stop the linkbait articles from people who have to have their play money.
I'm okay with removing submission karma. There are also a few other options for reducing the influence of submission karma that we should also consider:
* Have a karma cap for submissions. It could, for example, only give one karma for every ten upvotes (rounded down to discourage people from posting many articles). There could also be a hard maximum.
* Reward less karma if more people submitted the link manually. This gives less karma for popular things such as Paul Graham essays, TechCrunch articles, etc. When other people submit an article, it should still reward the article itself with upvotes, but it would make sense to reward the poster less since it is likely the story would have been posted anyway.
These alternatives are better than removing submission karma in that they still reward people for posting interesting content, but are worse in that they make things a little more complicated.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#18what about combining karma on new submissions with the karma on comments?
It is already combined. There is only one karma number per user. (You might be thinking of Reddit where they are separate.)
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#19http://news.ycombinator.com/classic shows the frontpage using only upvotes from older members. It's usually pretty similar.
Re: Fix HN by tying karma to upvotes.
#20Here's an idea:
Have karma and voting tied together. Your Karma is basically how much votes you get to give.
If someone makes a good post, people upvote it, spending their precious karma. The person made the post, collects the karma and and they can use it to vote other posts.
We can limit karma by having new users start off with 0. And they only way they can vote/get karma is to contribute positively with quality articles/posts.
Now it works the other way too. Make downvoting take away karma of the OP too, thus making people put more thought into their posts. The downvoting action will cost a vote, so people don't running around downvoting everything without thinking.
Basically let Karma/Vote be a resource that can be used to promote positive contribution and dissuade useless contributions.
The tricky part is balancing the karma in the whole system. Downvoting siphons votes/karma from the system, we need a way to introduce additional karma/votes into the system. Maybe a monthly replenish method where say everyone gets 10 votes each month. But in order to qualify for the monthly bonus, you must first contribute enough (get the up votes) past a certain threshold (say 100 upvotes to your posts/contributions).