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I am a long time lurker on hn, and like mzl, dont care about karma at all.

reading the ~160 comments on the topic, however, sounds weird to me because being indian, karma is not just a number against your online profile, but a fact of life - a word that you hear from people several times during a normal day - and they've probably never even been online.

i get that its about measuring the overall place of a person in a community, and that "karma" is as good a tag as any to condense that concept into one word, but it just seems very weird when there's so much debate around it. true karma is not exactly the "double-entry book keeping of life", nor does it have a leaderboard (which, btw, i realized existed on hn only recently).

on hn, the linked content's mostly great and its always useful to check the comments before loading up the link itself. that should be enough, imo.

ps: yes, i feel the same way watching "my name is earl", although i do enjoy the show itself.