"Why is it that when I willingly share my hard earned skills and knowledge, I get downmodded, and when I post a smarta$$ remark, I earn 20 unexpected points?" (edw519 in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97316)
May I use your comment quote in the promotional material for my next startup, SagaciousSmartassCommentGenerator.com?
Input: Whatever you want to say.
Output: Greatly compressed text (using our proprietary smartass algorithm) guaranteed to generate karma in even the harshest environments (Reddit, Digg, Slashdot)
My email blasts will probably have subject lines like, "Karma Enlargement: 12 Points Guaranteed"
Looks like karma, a mechanism designed to encourage people to post valuable comments, actually demotivates submitting everything more valuable, thus controversial. In other words, down-voting in comments, that was designed to punish exceptionally bad posts, actually punishes all exceptional comments.
Karma is designed to motivate submissions deemed valuable to the community. "Exceptional" is relative to the community and reflects its collective taste.
With this many headline spots, this many eyes, and this many submissions, it is unreasonable to expect a filtering mechanism that worked for population size x would work similarly for 10x. Your voice is diluted; what you used to consider {attribute} is now something completely orthogonal.
I know this may sound harsh, but someone who thinks of what they know as "hard-earned skills" may not have especially valuable insights. The good programmers I know don't think of themselves as having skills, and certainly not hard-earned ones; they just feel like there's some stuff they understand pretty well.
Uhm... without dividing that by the total number of results, you're not getting anything very meaningful. If that other number is 180 for YC, and 1,000,000,000 for Slashdot, YC is worse than Slashdot.
I like the concept though... measuring a site's godwin factor.
