On the flip side, I don't understand why someone should get 40 karma points for a two word witty comment, no matter how funny it was. Why isn't karma per comment limited to -1 to 10? Seems like it would limit karma bashing and karma mega-boosting.

If you limit the karma to 10 then a particularly good comment will eventually sink below comments that are upmodded later because of the way the ordering algorithm works. Similarly, a particularly bad comment will stay visible.

I don't see anything wrong with karma mega-boosting. At the end of the day it is just a number on your profile.

And much more likely any good comments that are not put in the first hour will never get the points that they deserve. Someone says something witty and gets 192 points. Two days later someone writes something very informative, but there are very few viewers after that so they get only 5 points. It would be foolish to think that an algorithm could compensate. Slashdot has this very problem years ago and solved it in a very good way. This reddit system of many points only works for when there is very small users, but does not scale.

- When people with long enough attention spans are invested in the conversation they will read through many of the comments. In many cases if you come into a conversation late you will be posting a reply because it is less likely you are coming in with a new angle. If you are posting a reply it is more likely others will see your comment because it will be visible on their threads page.

-I think the example you gave is a very rare case (I hope.) Unfortunately part of commenting right now is timing, which I do not have a problem with. If you post something informative two days into the conversation it will not have the same exposure, although depending on the conversation it will not appear far below the fold.

-I do see your point and I think it would be great if good comments that come late have more visibility. None or all of the following might help:

1) Delete comments and their replies once they reach a certain negative threshold (-5 for example.) Of course this gives downmodding a whole new meaning but maybe that is a good thing. This would make the comments section more readable and keep the conversation more civil and/or focused.

2) Highlight comments that were posted in the past 8 hours and have reached some karma threshold in yellow. This is a sort of "recent hot shots" feature. This way when an HN reader scans the page they can see what new comments are receiving upvotes more easily.

3) Give recent votes more weight then past votes. This means that a karma point awarded now means more than a karma point awarded an hour ago. Maybe the algorithm HN uses already does this- I am not sure.

I don't think pushing newer comments with fewer points up is a good idea because that changes the power up upvoting too drastically. Perhaps some anchor tags at the top of the comments section leading to the hottest new comments?

p.s. nice blog

So I started writing a reply that got longer and longer and I am going to turn it into a blog entry. Would you be willing to review it before I publish it?

Enjoy:

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/02/comments-rating-s...

I think he meant only credit the user with 10 karma points. The comment can still be boosted based on the number of up-mods it receives.

Wouldn't we then be saying that no comment is worth more than 10 points under any circumstances? I am not sure that is the proper behavior either. In this scenario a well thought out 3 paragraph critique would be limited to the same number of points as a two word quip.

Well the obvious next step is a logarithmic scale for comment values.

I'd prefer weighting the karma by comment length until it reaches at least three lines, combined with a markov chain that recognizes vocabulary like that in the linked article and common among insightful posts.

If you go this way you challenge people to beat it. Keep It Simple is the best.

This being said, the "unique post" robot proved to be a success in several implementations.

Possibly. But right now many two word quips get more points than longer, well though out, responses. If karma really has no value (over the few point levels currently defined) I guess it doesn't matter. But I always assumed that in the future karma points would be used for additional features.

Perhaps the upper limit shouldn't be 10, but the total number of words in the post. So a two word quip, only gets you two points. ;)

I have a related suggestion: show someone's median karma per comment and karma per post in his/her profile. This would shed light on someone's real contribution level: e.g. someone puts up a TC article and gets 128 pts in one day vs. someone makes 64 moderately insightful, 2 pt comments.

StackOverflow awards medals to bring out distinctions. I don't think we have to go that far, but it's a similar idea.

I think it's entirely valid to not add karma to a comment you agree because it's reached the karma you feel it deserves.

Similarly as people have pointed out you don't need pile on the down-modding simply because you don't agree with something.

I would almost say that unless something is actually disinformation, spam or trolling you shouldn't down-mod it, even if you disagree. Upvote the comments you agree with or write a persuasive argument instead.

One thing that I like about Stackoverflow.com is the ability to see how much people down/up mod.

Like say, Slashdot?

I have noticed a piling on of downmods in the past couple of weeks. TooMuchNick seems to have lost 30+ points for a couple of comments. They didn't add much to the conversation but they weren't so offensive that he deserved that. He got the point. Probably -1 would have accomplished it. HN is the most civil site that I have seen. All it takes is a gentle tap to remind a commenter the s/he didn't contribute to the discussion.

Sure, but he's from Valleywag (he launched the site and eventually got fired for being too gossipy even for Gawker and Valleywag), and he's starting a site to encourage people to keep a visual online diary of their sex lives. He'd have to post thousands of fantastic comments here in order to compensate for the damage to civility he's done in his life so far.

(I know this is kind of harsh, but if you think I wouldn't say it in person, you probably haven't met me.)

As far as I know, new users can't downmod.

True, but I think it's a lot easier to get to the karma level where you can downmod now. Unless the limits have been raised.

Perhaps that's the solution then: raise the limits for downmodding. Everyone on the leaderboard is now above 2000. Given the long-tail nature of such distributions, that means there's probably 1-2 thousand active users above 500 - more than enough to downmod spam/trolls.

I'd set the flag/downmod limit to 500.