Propose HN: 'Countless' experiment – hiding all karmic integers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745267

Perhaps someday we'll get a week without them.

I hope not. I actually miss seeing the karma count on individual comments, it made skimming a lot easier.

No chance. HN’s goal is to have every effective programmer in the world checking it at least once a week. Anything that gets in the way of that is de facto bad.

(I’d love to be surprised, though.)

You can get the same effect with a Tampermonkey script I wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456200

It even scrambles the karma count in your profile, so there’s no opportunity for karma to affect you.

Everything in moderation, right? Including games we play for imaginary Karma. I must say, though, I generally like the way HN does it. It isn't nearly as in your face and I don't find that motivates my behavior very much.

If I get too many positive karma posts in a row I start worrying I'm censoring myself too much. Positive karma usually means I'm just saying the most mainstream thing and that's boring.

The proposal is to see if site behavior changes as a whole when integers are removed. Individual opt-in doesn't permit such a test, nor does permitting opt-out.