Proposal to Remove "Average Karma Per Story/Comment"

Proposal to Remove "Average Karma Per Story/Comment"

1. 5d22b

   4 hours ago

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   I’d also be in favour of removing the up-vote counts from comments and stories.

   Currently, when users debate in comments, User A can post a disagreement to User B and then everyone else who disagrees with User B can upvote User A’s comment (and the upvote counts can show the degrees to which the community agrees with A vs B). I fear removing the upvote counts would clog up discussions with a proliferation of disagreeing comments, as that would be the only remaining way for users to show how disagreeable they find a comment.

   1. bomp

      edited 4 hours ago

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      This is important, IMO. For this reason, I think any major changes to karma should be considered just experiments.

      (Although, on a detail, you also have the option to flag comments if they’re extreeeeeeeemely disagreeable. When a thread is annoying I sometimes find myself thinking “go on, go on, deteriorate just a bit more so I can flag you”, but they rarely do. We can’t have too much flagging because a human has to consider how to respond to each flag. And anyway there is no flag for being merely wrong.)

2. OTH people who are here to discuss do it regardless of the internet points, and people who are here for the internet points: do we really want them engaging more in the comments?

   1. janus

      edited 3 hours ago

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      We definitely need exclude the people that write popular comments with nefarious purposes. That’s why moderators should be required to select and ban one high karma person every week. That way, users with too much karma will be extra wary and we can ensure that they concentrate on keeping the moderator team happy. Users with high karma should be banned from ever joining the moderation team. That way, the rich are prevented from ever taking over.

      1. I don’t like this model for Lobste.rs, but I do think we could apply it to at least one other situation.

   2. If people were really just here for internet points then I think they would be in the wrong place. The numbers get bigger on reddit and hacker news.

      If anything I imagine people come here out of interest and become tempted by the points. They are an expression of group approval and we are social creatures that evolved with some desire to be a member of the group. It’s easy to get to hung up wanting to be well liked.

3. I agree with everything you said but would maybe take it one step further; I don’t even know that buckets or saying, “user in good standing” is particularly useful as I don’t know that are any users not in good standing as they’re generally banned. Likewise, a hypothetical user with 1,000,000 karma could start acting like a total jerk and I don’t believe it would take 1,000,000 downvotes for that person to be banned. If anything “recent” karma is better than lifetime karma but even that I’d say isn’t particularly useful.

   We’ve already had users whom I very much respect with thousands in positive karma self select out of this community due to how metrics are used/displayed here which I view as a community loss.

   1. stig

      2 hours ago

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      If anything “recent” karma is better than lifetime karma but even that I’d say isn’t particularly useful.

      This is a good point. A high Karma is indicative of someone who has been contributing positively for a long time. But it’s not necessarily an indicator of current behaviour. They could have earned the karma in the past, and now be cruising. A “last 28 days Karma” would be more interesting—and would level the playing field so it’s not so biased towards old-timers.

4. If you submit a story without, say, ten comments with at least one upvote since the last one

   Maybe make it based on time since last post/comment, instead of the number of comments. It can be easy to write 10 comments in a minute just to post a new link. I think it would lower the quality in favor of quantity.

   But if you use a “time budget”, you’ll be more careful about what you share, since you are limited. And if a user tries to game the system by making other accounts, the user tree is already there to deal with that.

   I’m saying this from the point of view of someone who submit links more often that I comment. Mostly because I’m agreeing with what has been said, or have nothing to add, or everything that needed to be said has already been said. I don’t need to turn the comments into an echo chamber of “you are right”.

5. Some of the more interesting threads I’ve read here have been between two people who continue an in-depth discussion long after the collective attention has moved on from a story.

   That does lead to an interesting sorting strategy: sort by long lived. Maybe with some kind of decay to prevent little pings from surfacing old stuff.

   I do feel like I miss out on some of these really interesting long lived conversations sometimes. (However, I also miss out on some flame wars.)

6. cole-k

   6 minutes ago

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   RE: community norms, I would instead suggest something softer like two weeks of engaging with content on the site (upvoting/flagging/etc.). I want to recognize those who rarely comment but regularly visit the site and vote, since doing that is an important service too.