I think it's a great compromise: Get karma, you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility boost. Lose karma or post anonymous, and you get a slight, but not overpowering, visibility malus. Capping the range of post ratings at -1 and 5 ensures that nothing ever truly gets voted into oblivion. Oh yes, and you can post anonymous -- even when logged in! How cool is that.
Reddit is a prime example of a simple karma system going off the deep end. Instead of reinforcing good behavior, the trend is now that a substantial majority of the community competes for karma score. The noise level has increased sharply over the previous years such that the "popular reddits" are now in the same domain as Digg or 4chan. (Thankfully subreddits such as proggit are still an excellent source of information.)
I think karma works here at HN because it is a hidden score (to avoid the Reddit scenario) and the community heavily discourages low-quality posts. In a sense it relies directly on the userbase mentality and could easily be negated by a change in demographics. (Hopefully we maintain a high signal:noise ratio...)
/. meta moderation rewards users for moderating "correctly" and it doesn't consider the sum input of all users. It's not something that every community could or should adopt, but it certainly seems to have prevented a large fluctuation in community quality for well over a decade. It's also really awesome that comments are not just quantitatively scored, but also have qualitative tags.
Both you and Rob have effected the evolution of the Web as well as how we consume our news in more ways than we'll ever know.
That's only recently been the case, and the majority of the HN community still seems to be against it. If anything I've noticed more low-quality comments that haven't been downvoted lately, but that could easily, as you suggest, be a result of changing demographics and not connected with hidden karma. Unfortunately, as any community grows larger there will be a lowering of overall quality, though the number of high-quality comments may remain the same. It's the perception of lower quality that drives away the best members, so a preponderance of low-quality comments obscuring a number of very good ones can have a disastrous feedback effect.
I recall reading that part of pg's decision to start HN was as an experiment in entropy-avoidance. To that end, he has never sought to grow HN's traffic beyond that which the community could absorb. Now that HN is constantly mentioned in blogs, techcrunch, on facebook and g+, that might not be a viable strategy anymore. I eagerly await the changes he has in store for HN.
As for reddit's karma system being broken: that's not the problem. It's the demographic. The karma system works great in subreddits with a good community, and terribly in some of the larger subreddits with more of a 4chan/facebook crowd. Determining visibility by voting is only a problem when the voters are idiots. Also, as much as the HN community (many of them current and former redditors) may decry the devolution of reddit's overall quality, we really aren't the target audience. Reddit is a business that makes money through growth, and the overall reduction in quality has coincided with a huge surge in popularity and profitability. That's no accident. We may not like it anymore, but that's not an indictment of their business model or strategy.
Rob will be missed.
I was one of the "cool kids" who switched from Slashdot to K5 back when it started (back then we had 3 digit K5 id numbers, now we have Klout scores)
I stopped visiting it, but I am curious why it seems to have half died, but is still running. What's the story there?
Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old.
I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh
Yep, I felt really great that day.
For all its downsides, Slashdot is a quite interesting experiment imo.
In terms of form: It was one of the first (the first?) widely read tech blogs, in the sense of something that posted about technology in reverse chronological order, with a comments section below it (the comments section was even threaded). The idea of having users submit stories and write blurbs was also fairly novel, and has led to several different directions. Kuro5hin and MetaFilter took it in one direction, expanding from blurbs to more general kinds of article submissions (and Kuro5hin switched to voting rather than editorial curation), while Reddit/Digg/HN took it in the opposite direction, paring it down to link submissions with no blurb (again with voting).
In terms of content, imo it was a main way, especially in the late 90s, that a generation of tech people were introduced to things like the EFF, free software, problems of software patents, driver support for Linux, hardware hackability, and other such techno-liberty type things. Those predated Slashdot, of course, but it sort of crystallized a community on the web, alongside those that had previously been organized mainly around mailing lists, Usenet, etc. It also gained considerable mindshare for those ideas from a broader set of readers who weren't necessarily "activists".