I'm going to have to say no. One of the largest sources of anxiety in our society is this belief that we have a dossier following us around. And we do. New jobs won't hire us without references from our old jobs. We have to fill in empty spaces in some way. Schools won't let us in unless we have a good record.

The internet allows some respite from that. We can simply create an account and go on our merry way. Screw up? Start over!

Yes, it allows trolls to troll, but it also removes the anxiety of failure and dossiers. It's (one reason) why OpenID hasn't caught on - most people would rather NOT authenticate beyond reasonable doubt that they are who they say they are on the internet across sites. They don't want everything they've said to be traceable to them.

If this is an opt-in system built around a number of sites where you can share karma OpenID-style, you'll find people creating their own shell sites to boost their karma. Good for nothing. If it's a mandatory system in a few sites, you'll find users rebel. We choose our communities because we want to be there and we recognize that when we go to another community, we need to work to gain a reputation there.

Couldn't disagree more. Here's my .02:

1. I don't think the existence of reputation causes a great deal of anxiety in our society. In fact, until the advent of the Internet, this was largely how society functioned: you were known for what you had accomplished or failed to accomplish, for your associations, for your character or lack thereof. This is still largely the way things are, and I don't think most people think about it very much at all.

2. Drawing a corollary between anxiety over damage to your reputation due to poor performance at a previous job and anxiety because too many people down-voted you on Hacker News and now your karma score is distributed is...well...ridiculous. Hacker News isn't real life, and that little number by your username means pretty much nothing.

3. The proposed idea would not stop people from creating new accounts, fake accounts, etc. In no way would this inhibit anonymity, which seems to be what you're suggesting.

4. I doubt if most people would resist the idea that if they build a reputation in one community, it would be transferable to another community. People are lazy, and generally do not resist anything that makes life easier or more convenient for them.

Incidentally, I strongly doubt that any of the top 10 reasons why OpenID hasn't taken off are what you stated; people will give up just about anything for convenience sake. OpenID hasn't taken off because most people just don't care enough to try and understand it.

Again, just my .02 :-)

One issue with porting karma, rather than just being able to display different site's karma rankings on your blog or something, would be the ability to gain tons of karma at the Beenie Babies site where I am a subject matter expert and then appearing knowledgeable in a commercial banking forum.

On OpenID, I think the main reason it hasn't taken off is because it's confusing, actually makes a sign-in process take longer and isn't supported widely enough to be anything but a deviation in the normal UI experience to date.

I think you're spot on with your points. Have another $0.02.

What gives me karma here might not give me karma at other sites and vice versa.

A "karma is hard - let's go shopping" comment would get a high rating on reddit and a negative rating here.

So your karma is tied to the site, and tells very little about how "popular" you would be elsewhere on the net.

Let's start by allowing karma transfers between users here...

While going through some of the recent controversial threads on HN, I felt that something like this would be a nice thing:

When people mindlessly downmod some controversial but valid comment, some people who stand for free speech and connect with the validity of the comment might want to upmod it more than +1 and show their support. In such cases, the extra upmods should be in the form of karma transfer. It's analogous of throwing your reputation on the line and standing up for someone.

Or how about transfers just between our own comments?

I'd love to be able to slide surplus karma from dumb-but-popular things I've said to the underappreciated, more controversial comments I'm more proud of. :)

With a transfer cost of course :) Otherwise you could misuse your karma to move your comments up all the while.

And I have a hunch that high ranking comments gain points exponentially, not linearly.

I'm not sure if that's what I mean -- but some posts seem to get more points just because they already have a lot of points.

Like pop songs in that study where they divided people into groups and had them rate songs? It seems almost inevitable. That sort of positive feedback can make a system more sensitive, but it can also make it unstable, amplifying noise until it overwhelms small signals. My third connection is that, if your hypothesis is correct (and I'm pretty sure it is) you would tend to expect comment karma to be distributed according to a Zipf distribution.

isn't this what "open social" is all about? i mean you can't carry your karma (actually a pretty weird concept to me), but a person that chooses to associate with you, gets to see your profile, your friends, your pictures, and whatever other info you choose to share. i think this model closely follows how real life works. having a rating that describes and follows you, i think, is fairly useless (i'm sure plenty of you will disagree).

Interesting thought but I really prefer the isolation we have here.

right! I too don't want guys to just signup and post here just to show off their News.YC karma. It's a lot better to be isolated and share stuff rather than showing off karma.

tbh i see no use in this karma thing.

Don't call it Karma.

Call it with its real name: Democratic Dictatorship.

a universal "reputation" tied to your email account might be useful

universally

I use friendfeed for this.

i believe that's how rapleaf started out.

Any initial impressions of RapLeaf? I've come across them a couple of times.