On a related note, the community's voting patterns encourage the witty one-line comments over the thoughtful 3-sentence comments. Look at any article, and you'll see the type of comments this incentive produces.

It's hard to represent something subjective in a single number. This problem isn't really solvable. Making the karma algorithm too complex could make it even worse.

I think making someone's karma filter subjective could solve the problem. Then it would also be hard to game the system, since you'd have to know how most people filtered karma.

This filter could either be based on how people vote, or using karma and something else as the criteria.

An example of the latter, I've thought the good comments would be those that maximize length and karma. That means they are both substantive and well written enough to hold people's attention. Plus, it's too long to be witty:) This could be implemented entirely client side without the need to open up voting data.

Finally, it'd fit great into the whole hacker mentality, since people could pass around and hack the best filters.

(note: this idea has been said by many others, I'm merely trying to perpetuate the meme)

<insert witty one line comment here> ;)

<insert even wittier reply here> :p

This seems to question the whole purpose of karma. When a user upvote a story, isn't he saying "Thanks for sharing this with the community.I want more people to see this" rather than "i agree with the content of this article"?

Karma encourages users to participate in the sharing activity.Its purpose is not to thank the content creator, but the person who took time to share it.

[Vote ≠ Karma]

I would say that an upvote is saying:

"This is good content. I'm glad you submitted it, I'm glad the writer wrote it, and I'm glad I read it."

Upvotes are NOT saying "I agree with this" (I don't think).

The current karma encourages scouring the web for good content for the community. It does not reward creating of good content for the community... I suppose a person could submit their own stuff if they cared that much.

There are more than two reasons a user might upvote another user's post.

Some of the many situations one might click the up arrow:

- to thank others for posting to one's thread in order to create a positive feedback loop

- to increase visibility of what a user wrote or submitted

- to display agreement with points made in the submission

- to "save" the submission for future reference, as users can track what they've upvoted in the past

- to promote a specific idea or ideology

Tipjoy has a system of associating sites with users. Manually finding that someone owns a site is easy. Automatic authentication involves a detectable change in the site.

For example, if PG wrote a crawler to find HackerNews:ivankirigin on my blog, it would be known that I own that blog (just the subdomain though, not all of blogspot.com).

The vast majority of content on HackerNews is created by non-hackernews readers. They aren't going to do anything like this.

So while such a system would be useful, it would be practically difficult to make a real impact.

Ha, I can't imagine what my karma would be if I got points for the articles I submitted that others posted. But I guess if I cared, I would just post them myself.

The 'problem' of claiming site/post ownership could be solved with public key cryptography. However, so far, no one's bothered to do so.

>> how to reliably "claim" a blog is a challenge

OpenID

Does the karma really do anything? Or is there a complicated algorithm that sorts comments based on people's karma?

I'm pretty sure the sorting of comments has nothing to do with karma of the poster, just the votes on that particular comment, and how old it is - similar to how stories are ranked on the front page.

It's making a game out of it, which gets a small subset of users maniacal about their Karma score and thus submitting tons of good content. PG = Crafty Devil.

The karma score of each person should show up next to people's names then. It's kinda hidden away right now.

This sounds like a good idea for a greasemonkey script.

I kind of like that idea. It's useful to keep track of what people have generally agreed with in a discussion, or to move things up the front page, but significantly less so for the site as a whole.

Posts with higher karma gravitate to the top of the comment tier in which they reside. e.g.: (12 (4 2 2 1) 8 (5 (3 1) 2 1) 2 (8 1 -2) 1 1 0)