Ask HN: Do social sites with karma need a decay function? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by gambling8nt » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 10:02 PM UTC

mechanical_fish wrote: post #9

PieSquared wrote: post #7

I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0. That will encourage continual good behavior.

I think rankings in other sports might be more fun if they worked more like HN rankings. Baseball fans do a lot of that. It's kind of what baseball statistics are all about: The player in front of you is not just competing with himself, and the other players on the field, and the other players in the league. In a sense, he's competing with Lou Gehrig. Of course, the reason to avoid putting dead players in the ranking…

I don't think we actually want to have chair-throwing debates over who the karma leaders are...while the leaderboard is a slight concession in the general direction of caring about karma, this site has always been set-up to stress the content of a comment over the nature of the author precisely because the accumulation of karma should be mostly irrelevant. Every comment that is posted about karma or some other meta-aspect of the community (including this one) is another comment that isn't actually content itself, and we should be trying to minimize such things when it is possible to do so.

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

#32

Post by walterk » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 10:47 PM UTC

I would just hide (not remove) karma entirely. Submissions, comments, and users. That removes the incentive to game for karma and mitigates against the bandwagon effect, while the karma system still determines placement of submissions and comments within their respective threads. And I'd argue that high placement is reward enough in itself to promote meaningful contributions. Obviously, people can still try to game for placement, but it's less interesting when it doesn't contribute to an overall user score.

Anything having to do with a leader board, in contrast, simply encourages people to game for karma.

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

#33

Post by lehmannro » Mon, Nov 24, 2008, 6:14 AM UTC

sh1mmer wrote: post #22

PieSquared wrote: post #7

I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0. That will encourage continual good behavior.

That encourages lock-in. What if my wife had a baby and I went offline for a year because I didn't have time. Would that make my opinions suddenly invalid? Tennis rankings are based on physical form. Physical form is something much more likely to change year to year than intellectual form. Someone might be out of date with the latest topics, consensus from the community, etc but it doesn't imply their thinking appara…

But then again karma is no indicator for intellect or sanity, is it?