Re:How Karma Should Be Measured
by yason on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @06:02AM
(#2920150)
I think it's more fruitful to consider where you can get karma and on what basis than how the actual karma sources are computed into some final number.
The most important aspect of HN is the culture which we want to preserve. So users should get new points/votes/karma when they reinforce the culture and lose points/votes/karma when they break the culture apart.
Voting is the only means to change the karmic dynamic of users. So voting should be reserved to the active old timers in greater proportion and to the newcomers in smaller proportion.
For example, newbies shouldn't be able to vote at all below a karma threshold and when they are, their votes should have a fractional effect compared to the vote of an old timer. Maybe something like if one 4000-karma guy downvotes a comment it would need to take 100 of 40-karma guys to upvote it back to zero but only 10 of 400-karma guys. If all HN users voted on an item, the weight of each vote would be a single user's karma / total sum of karma of all HN users. Of course, only a subset of users ever vote on a single item so the total sum should be limited to a subset of users, such as those expressing interest in voting for that item or those having voted for that submission or any of its other comments. As long as newcomers can't come and upvote each others comments to gain karma without the approval of the high-ranking old timers. Therefore, those newcomers who can already vote would contribute fractional karma points witht their votes.
Those old timers who define the culture can perhaps be identified by their karma, as recursive as it sounds. At some point the karma reaches some natural limitation as it's much more difficult to obtain tens of thousands of karma points than thousands. So eventually the most persistent ones would gradually join the higher ranks because it would be really hard to escape.
But the computation of karma probably doesn't matter much. Just adding up votes will sufficiently track the relative ranking of each user.
The most important aspect of HN is the culture which we want to preserve. So users should get new points/votes/karma when they reinforce the culture and lose points/votes/karma when they break the culture apart.
Voting is the only means to change the karmic dynamic of users. So voting should be reserved to the active old timers in greater proportion and to the newcomers in smaller proportion.
For example, newbies shouldn't be able to vote at all below a karma threshold and when they are, their votes should have a fractional effect compared to the vote of an old timer. Maybe something like if one 4000-karma guy downvotes a comment it would need to take 100 of 40-karma guys to upvote it back to zero but only 10 of 400-karma guys. If all HN users voted on an item, the weight of each vote would be a single user's karma / total sum of karma of all HN users. Of course, only a subset of users ever vote on a single item so the total sum should be limited to a subset of users, such as those expressing interest in voting for that item or those having voted for that submission or any of its other comments. As long as newcomers can't come and upvote each others comments to gain karma without the approval of the high-ranking old timers. Therefore, those newcomers who can already vote would contribute fractional karma points witht their votes.
Those old timers who define the culture can perhaps be identified by their karma, as recursive as it sounds. At some point the karma reaches some natural limitation as it's much more difficult to obtain tens of thousands of karma points than thousands. So eventually the most persistent ones would gradually join the higher ranks because it would be really hard to escape.
But the computation of karma probably doesn't matter much. Just adding up votes will sufficiently track the relative ranking of each user.