I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes.

Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.

If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart.

For instance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551

Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.

why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.

Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.

Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it.

> I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.

That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff.

On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber.

Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded.

It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.

If I wanted to boost my comment score average, I would very deliberately formulate even more bogus opinions about popular "controversies". Oh, I sure would come up with a lot of crap to say about Zynga, the Apple Tablet, and Websprockets.

It would work, because haunting the less popular topics has been a surefire way to get my average to drop.

If you do not display the votes but you do pretend that you're counting them you have not solved the problem at all.

On an 'average' forum that sort of trick might work but HN is populated by some of the smartest people I have run in to in the last 20 years or so and it will not take them much work at all to find out whether or not their votes are counted.

I can already think of two ways right of the bat.

Why not show a percentile for comments? Before there are 10 or 20 or so comments on a page, don't show any score of any kind (except maybe gray out really bad comments). Then, when the number of comments is high enough, display a percentile compared to all the other positively ranked comments. You can still use points internally, but you display a much fuzzier number to users. It is useful to quickly pick out the best comments to read, but once a comment becomes one of the best in the thread, no one will have to keep voting it up (and similar for down). People will just cast votes to say "this comment is over (or under) valued" not to say "This comment deserves another (or one less) karma point".

I'd really love to see you run that experiment for a day or two :-) What do you say?

It will at least make people that have been here for a long time have the same privileges as an account that is less than 5 minutes old.

I'd hate to be in your shoes on this one, it's one of those 'damned if you do/damned if you don't' kind of things.

From the sidelines it is easy enough to criticize but I've run enough websites to know that a users point of view is not always the same as the point of view of the person that tries to maintain the atmosphere.

I'm all for dropping the points, in fact, as far as I'm concerned you can drop the leaderboard as well.

If someone is interested in the karma of a user they can always go and look at the profile.

At least like that we get rid of stupid comments like 'I made it my mission to be in the top 100'.

If I had to put a number on it I'd say 1 karma point today equates anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes of work on HN.

If you were to express that in money, given the kind of expertise that walks around here anybody on the leaderboard has spent upwards of several thousand $ worth of their time, which gives you an idea of how much they get back out of it.

edit: On plastic.com, they stopped displaying user scores at 50 when it became a competition. -- you could do that too: remove the ego from karma.

If you decide to hide comment points, perhaps consider at least showing the points after you vote. I'm not sure if that would encourage voting, though, in a case where people would have skipped voting before. I know I would vote more often in that case.

I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread.

I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens. If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.

Averaging comment karma sounds like a terrible idea. Some of the best posts are made in intelligent, long conversations several levels down the comment tree, which are almost never upvoted. Wouldn't it discourage such conversations?

Absolutely.

You can expect a complete change in atmosphere due to this.

A comment that has been down-voted 50 times and up-voted 55 times is not the same as a comment that has been up-voted 5 times. Up-vote and down-vote are not opposites. They are just two flavors of passion; the opposite of up-vote and down-vote is indifference. If a comment is only getting up or down votes, it's a pretty good chance that the person is saying something insightful or everyone likes or there's something wrong with their delivery, or it's a universally unpopular idea.

Also, some people say you shouldn't use points to censor an unpopular idea, but not everyone is doing that. It only takes a few people going around doing that to make the community start to suck. Here's a rage-quit by a guy feeling that he was being censored:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054044

There should be a way for that guy to see that nobody agrees with him without feeling like he's losing something personal. And people do take their points personally.

The ideas of "I agree" and "I disagree" are conflated with the idea of "I think this is a good discussion". Perhaps if you have a back and forth going on, you can show people's votes without affecting karma. The discussion itself might be interesting even if one person is playing devils advocate.

This would be awesome.

Long story short: If you're going to disable some action I think it's actually better in the long run to make it obvious that's what you're doing.

Then I won't be wasting time clicking arrows that don't do anything :/

That is not the intention, I'm sure but still to have a 'pacifier' vote button there that is not functional feels like I'm in someone else's car with a plastic non-functional steering wheel.

axod is 3.65: http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_poin...

jacquesm is 3.03: http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by...

Possibly the code is more broken than pg realizes (or perhaps it's searchyc that's got it wrong).

I think the averages are behind the learderboard point totals, not what searchyc says (it doesn't have direct access to the HN db).

I didn't realise it happened at all until seeing Jacquesm's comments about it, and I'm still undecided about whether it's annoying or not.

It's more annoying when a thread goes "comment by me no votes, comment by someone else upvotes, reply by me no votes", for instance, and the result of that kind of thing needs an internal adjustment of the sort "clearly my replies aren't as good as I'm thinking they are". I get a similar feeling from this - yes I'm going out of my way to vote up effortful comments and vote down weak, silly, effortless comments but maybe my votes aren't as 'good' as they should be.

Not like being patronised by a car with a plastic steering wheel as mentioned above, but like something that's out of alignment due to misunderstanding the "HN way".

Personally I don't think people should have their comment voting rights removed, without being told, unless they're really causing trouble. And even then, let them know so they can adjust their behavior/leave.

This sort of thing just kills communities IMHO.

Mine is at 1.91 and I can't vote so that would make sense.

BTW I seem to be able to vote again now. Thanks pg! kinda nice... Though now I feel the weight of responsibility again. However, the big OCD thing is that now the UI works properly! I really like that. And, no longer being a persona non grata (an exaggeration; I could still comment and vote on submissions).

Odd: my average is precisely "2". Not "2.00" (as it is for robg, #6 on the leaders). Have you kindly promoted me, or is it just an coincidence (and you're using different formatting)?

EDIT my average should have decreased with this comment score at 1, but it hasn't (unless there's lag of course).

If people are going to be worried that their vote average is going to be negatively impacted by a controversial view then they will simply keep it to themselves.

My current average is probably a lot higher then usual because I had some relatively early comments on the Google in China thread. Those comments probably got read by 100X or 1000X times as many of my other comments.

Most votes are up, not down. The biggest factor (I think) is how many people read it. The second biggest is how many people care. The third is how many agree or otherwise like the comment.

Say what you believe in. Karma, comment average is unimportant.

I rarely vote anyways, so if I ever lost the ability (which I don't think I ever have), I would not care. I'm here to talk, not to vote.

You must be new here :)

> Say what you believe in. Karma, comment average is unimportant.

Absolutely, but the general case will, at least as long as the leaderboard exists, be the opposite.

> I'm here to talk, not to vote.

Voting on articles is useful because it gives good stuff more attention. Voting on comments is useful to get rid of the trolls, and it allows people that have limited time to spend to browse HN articles fast to get the good stuff.

RoG was getting more downvotes than average HN user (1.88 vs 2.0). How does inhibiting his power to rate help this "crowd egging" thing you are referring to?

The pattern seems to be more that I make a few contributions that are seen and well regarded. They get lots of votes. I make a few contributions that don't get noticed, or that no one likes. They get no votes. And I make a lot of contributions that cross-reference, location duplications, point people to other discussions, and generally try to help tie things up. I do that because my background in online communities is more in wiki technology, where house-keeping is essential.

Those many, many contributions get very little attention, and no up votes. The net result is that all the small notes that try to make things better drag my average down.

I think the use of the average karma is mis-guided. At least I can see what mine is, as I'm on the leader board.

Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

I trust PG when he says using average karma didn't help solving the problem but I don't have an opinion myself simply because I didn't even understand what the problem is exactly (Is it people splitting their votes between two contestants in a verbal fight?).

From my limited experience in web communities, karma always ends up being: people upvoting when they agree, downvoting when they don't. As I see it, the only good use of karma are 1) to decrease the number of "I agree" comments 2) to isolate obvious trolls.

This said, I don't care about Karma. The only feature I wish HN had is a "save button" similar to what reddit has. The reason is that it would allow me to follow up better the destiny of all those guys who come here and ask "rate/review my startup".

  >> ... I started tracking my karma a while ago
  > Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

For what it's worth, I completely support PG in his continuing efforts to improve things. I appreciate that he will continue to make changes to try to address the problems that arise in a large site, and I realise that not all changes can be made completely openly.

It's a difficult problem with no general solutions. Yet. I'd like to think that contributors here will play a part in keeping this site of high-quality, and perhaps finding methods that will work more generally.

We're thinking of ways to allow people to turn their karma in to more tangible forms of rewards as well, such as one-shot functionality that you pay for with karma and physical goodies from a 'karma store'.

1) Earn points by commenting and submitting. 2) Earn points by being voted up. 3) Spend points by voting someone down. 4) Loose points by being voted down.

(I think the up/down totals might be shown to good effect, not necessarily cluttering the main thread, but on the item detail/reply page.)

As someone who often tries to represent/defend the "unpopular" side of a topic, I see this dynamic in action a lot. The graph of my karma accrual over time must look like a yoyo sporadically wielded by someone walking slowly up a gentle slope.

I mean, we're mostly white collar upper middle class males here. The cultural overlap is huge. It would be pretty boring, not to mention unchallenging, if I just agreed with everyone all the time ..

I think a respectful approach is to be upfront, and just say there's a cut-off, instead of making the votes appear to count. I assume you want to obscure it, to protect HN from scamming, but I'm not sure that valuing protection over respect will work in the long term.

EDIT I'd like to upvote some of the comments here, but what's the point? They won't count.

Seems like we're kind of getting backwards who is supposed to be in charge here, the person or the algorithm.

We're getting there.

The last few weeks have been pretty rough in this respect.

Cheating your way to the top is fine, simple requests get denied, basic site functionality appears to be broken but turns out to be working as designed only nobody thought of making it plain.

It's a fine line between subtlety and disrespect.

I recognize the good intention, but the "vote not counting" thing is on a visceral, psychological level very irritating. It feels antagonistic.

I recommend that you kill that feature in the short term, and then proceed to remove scores from most comment displays.

Hard to tell the difference.

If you look at the status bar of your brower, your vote has only registered with the server when it says 'done' again.

If you refresh before then you may cancel the vote altogether.

(Finding a random comment to downvote is more effort than I want to spend on this problem).

Input to the site is input to the site. If it's well-intentioned, it should be helpful. I assume the 65% rule was put in place to handle abusive semiautomated voting.

I'm not sure I understand how that's materially different than what you are doing?

So the vast majority of the time when you do go to vote on a comment, it's a downvote? I know that you didn't get a karma in the mid-20k's by having people do that to you -- perhaps they should have. As this discussion is revealing, the system has artificially capped you at 65% but by your own admission it would be some significant percentage higher than that?

I'm not sure which adjective I could use to describe such malevolent behavior...."shocking" comes to mind, but so does "abusive".

I mean, I'm sitting here stunned. This means that you click the little down arrow at a rate almost 2x the rate you click the little up arrow. And that's only because the system has capped you to that "low" of a downvote rate. Given your druthers it would be higher. Or to put that into perspective, that's ~15 thousand points of your current karma score if this site gave you a point for every vote you doled out.

So that I can not loose all faith in humanity, I have to ask this honest question:

Do the things people have to say around here either not make an impression on you so you don't bother voting ever, and when you do it's only out of some kind of indignant revulsion and you've only voted some trivial number of times, like 3 times total? (Please say yes).

and people seem to not comprehend my bitching about the downvote hoards on HN

When I see something overtly bad: a troll, something irretrievably wrong from a technical perspective, or an over-the-line personal attack with no redeeming content, I'll reliably downvote it.

Otherwise, I don't vote. I'd rather reply to something than vote it down anonymously, and if you're going to reply, downvoting the parent is counterproductive; it effectively asks the site to bury your comment along with the parent.

I'm sure I routinely downvote things out of pique just like everybody else, and I'm sure I occasionally upvote things too. Those events cancel each other out. Meanwhile, I'm still reliably downvoting bad stuff. Hence, 65%.

To be honest, I don't really care what you think of how I use the site. I just want to speak up in defense of the idea that up/down percentages don't matter. Like short sales, downvotes contribute to the efficiency of the site, just like upvotes do.

PS: Now I have read it, and I'm glad I didn't before I wrote the comment above. Come off it. If you want to know how I got to ridiculous levels of karma --- besides commenting a lot --- I'll tell you: once you get to a certain level of karma (which we'll treat as a proxy for all sorts of other reputation effects on HN), it becomes self-reinforcing. You and I could make the exact same comment and I will reliably get voted higher than you, because fewer people expect "good" comments from you. So, go ahead and downvote me as much as you'd like. You'd actually be making my comment scores more accurate.

1) >When I see something overtly bad: a troll, something irretrievably wrong from a technical perspective, or an over-the-line personal attack with no redeeming content, I'll reliably downvote it.

I think this is good. I don't think anybody will argue with you on the merits of this kind of downvoting. In fact, on some level, most people would even think you are too light on trolls and the like since there is a flag option intended for just those kinds of users.

2) >Otherwise, I don't vote. I'd rather reply to something than vote it down anonymously, and if you're going to reply, downvoting the parent is counterproductive; it effectively asks the site to bury your comment along with the parent.

Again, I think this is good. The purpose of a forum like this is to drive discussion not karma building. Comments as replies with or without a vote up/down is far more valuable than an anonymous vote. I think we also agree that downvoting can also have the effect of "tainting" an entire thread so that further responses are also downvoted or nobody participates in that entire sub-tree. I applaud your willingness to participate and engage in this site via contributing comments and discussion. We've butted heads here before as well, and I enjoyed every bit of the engagement despite our strong differing opinions.

>I'm sure I routinely downvote things out of pique just like everybody else, and I'm sure I occasionally upvote things too. Those events cancel each other out. Meanwhile, I'm still reliably downvoting bad stuff. Hence, 65%.

Actually you would be over 65% since the site's logic no longer allows you to downvote (at least according to pg). 65% is the cutoff, given no limit you would probably be much higher than that.

> I just want to speak up in defense of the idea that up/down percentages don't matter.

I most strongly disagree with this. By force of logic, if they didn't matter, there wouldn't be a cap...period. The fact that there is a cap is designed to control for users of the site such as yourself.

And you are right, it doesn't matter what I think, I'm just a low karma user that writes too much. However, it does matter what pg thinks, and he thinks that up:down ratios like yours represents such bad behavior that he took the time to build a control into the site explicitly for that purpose. You, I and pg agree, there is a body of users on HN that represent abusive downvoters -- hence the control. You simply don't think you are part of that group for some reason.

> Like short sales, downvotes contribute to the efficiency of the site, just like upvotes do.

I do not disagree with this, hence the existence of a downvote mechanism. Like negative feedback in any social situation, it's a social normalization function designed to move a person towards an equilibrium of thought and action with their social group (just like my negative feedback to you is intended to do). I'm not sure it's always helpful since it tends to suppress out-of-the-box thinking as well as bad behavior, but it is there.

However, you and I must read different HN sites. Unless you spend your entire day policing http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments and downvoting "trolls, bad info and personal attacks", or you vote so seldom that a vote either way makes up a large percentage of your total, I simply don't see a particularly large number of posts on this site that fit into your three criteria. I may be mistaken, but I'm guessing that pg has also not deputized you in some fashion as a body responsible for policing HN -- feel free to correct me on this.

I personally think that the user community on this site tends to not skew towards those categories which is one of the reasons I enjoy this site so much.

Please don't take this as a personal attack, I know that your intentions are good. But you seem to be the only habitual downvoter that has decided to make themselves known to the user community at large so my focus is on you. Really, my focus is on the group of such like-similar downvoters since they represent a significant portion of the small list of reasons where I don't find this site enjoyable.

p.s. I upvoted your comment.

Setting the threshold around 1.5 might work better. Or perhaps whatever threshold might allow 75% or 80% of readers/contributors to vote.

Votes are a currency with which users tell each other what their feelings are, setting some arbitrary limit on that ability to express means the underlying system is broken.

Either voting works as a mechanism to identify quality content, or it doesn't.

If voting is to be limited to those that want to engage in group-think (the quickest way to boost your average is to post stuff people will find agreeable) then we'll soon have very bland conversations here.

You must have missed the bit where this was brought up many times before over a period of months.

This is the first time there actually is an answer and it turns out that at least from where I'm sitting this 'feature' was actually detrimental.

If there would have been some more user input I highly doubt this would have been implemented.

Popular - >= 10 votes

Interesting - 3-9 votes

Contributor - 1-3 votes

Neutral - no votes

Unpopular - -1 votes

Detractive - <= -2 votes

And show those instead of points or votes. Karma could still be calculated normally, and the votes could be used internally for thread sorting.

If you take away the mob's power by only allowing points to go down to 0 or 1 for example instead of -4 it might feel less mob-ish..

EDIT: The end result of mob encouraged commenting is someone ends up with negative points for their comment(s).. Maybe only users who've reached certain karma level should have the ability to down vote below 1. Reduce the size of the mob?

That would eliminate the 'wrong/inappropriate' all together and the mob would disband? Human behaviour is complicated indeed.

I have my own favoured scheme, which is basically votes counting less the further they go above/below neutral. The first eight votes will get you up to 8. But then you need another 8 to get up to twelve, 16 to get to 16, 32 to get to 20, etc. Downvoting would be similar but without the positive bias, ie 4 to -4, then another 8 to get to -8, etc.

By removing the possibility of "windfall" results, that system might be reducing the incentive to appeal to the mob in the first place. And people will be less likely to add yet another vote if it's already +12, say - they know their vote's mostly impotent by then. Could settle things down.

I thought it wrong before, when unlimited downvotes were possible - there'd always be some sorry cur saying something the crowd didn't like and down he went, by 20, 30, 50. That was terrible, and has now been thankfully stopped. But ridiculously high upvotes continue and create undesirable incentives, IMO.

Wow, that was an essay, sorry, hehe

(Edited for brevity)

Have you thought about hiding the submitter's and commenter's name for an hour (or twelve :)) after the post is submitted?

Won't that solve the problem of mob voting?

    (def possible-sockpuppet (user)
      (or (ignored user)
          (< (uvar user weight) .5)
          (and (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*)
               (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*))))

I also think in the past I have had it removed for:

- upvoting different stories in quick succession (came back to the page to vote stories I liked....)

- downvoting the same person 2-3 times in the space of about 20 minutes in different threads (without realising I must stress!) with no other votes in between

It comes back after X amount of time.

> but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value.

Yeh I feel that; I read now but dont bother to contribute many votes.

</patronising>

Secondly, this is a great resource of both contacts and information. It's made great because of the quality of people here, and the time they take to submit, comment, and vote. Without that time from people with busy lives, HN will become rather non-special.

I'm pointing out that at least one person here now feels, because of a stated policy, that their time is undervalued, so I'm thinking of taking it elsewhere. I do have an outside life, I was investing time here because I thought it might be valued. I'm re-evaluating that decision

I'm not going to walk away without explanation. When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why. I'm giving PG the courtesy to let him know my reactions to his policies. It's his site and he can and will do as he chooses. So far he's done an extraordinary job.

Think of this as customer feedback.

Sentences like "I'm not going to walk away without explanation." sound (mildly) pompous and priggish.

You could cut all the dramatics and posturing from your post, state the facts (as you see them) plainly, provide any supporting data and ask a polite question about the effect you want and what you can do to help.

Sentences like "When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why." and "Think of this as customer feedback." have an assumption built in which may not hold.

"user" != "customer".

I could've taken more time to explain that more clearly, and it probably would've sounded better, but I really do have other things to do.

The simple facts are that my votes don't count, I don't know why, I thought I was a useful contributor, I resent the implicit message that my votes aren't valued, and I think it's rude to walk away from a service because of a perceived flaw without giving feedback.

I'd be interested to know what people think the difference is between "user" and "customer." Perhaps a "user" simply doesn't pay in any way, whereas a "customer" does. I prefer to be a "customer." In return for the contacts I've made and information gained, I'm happy to repay by taking time to add value.

Most companies try to turn users into customers. I'm just pointing out that the current situation has turned a customer into a user, and that might not be what was intended.

(But then again, given that this is HN, maybe assuming their code isn't bug free is a worse insult? ;-)

(ADDED IN EDIT: PG has said: "I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count.")

And in some sense I'm content that for some reason and in some way my votes have been deemed irrelevant. I'd just like to know why. More than that, I spend time thinking before I vote. If my vote has no effect, I won't waste that time.

You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the HN code the benefit of the doubt.

  > I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an
  > editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore.

  > Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will
  > recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that
  > exhibit that behavior.

  > That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false
  > positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

  > You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the
  > HN code the benefit of the doubt.

For you it is 'just a news forum', for me it has been:

  - a source of knowledge
  
  - a source of friendship

  - a source of income

  - a way to help others

  - a way to find help

I'm considering creating a new user because of that as I've tried to just wait for it to work again hoping it's temporary. I have no idea what caused me to loose my voting rights in the first place and there's no way for me to change my behavior if it's undesirable. I've for the record never voted maliciously and this is my username because I've lost my password twice before not because I have several users to vote with.

It also might've been better handled by a short email to him.

  > pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a
  > short list of people whose comments he tends to
  > find interesting ...

  > It also might've been better handled by a short
  > email to him.

...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.

(I have had voting problems previously.)

The longest I ever had was about 2 months (give or take - I was away for part of it). The longest ever someone has mentioned to me has been about 3 1/2 months

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458

It appears that in this case, as in others before mine, he's decided that he's not going to count my votes. I have no idea why. As I say, it makes me inclined not to bother giving much back to the site, even though it's a great resource.

And I'm asking - what have I done to trigger the mechanism?

I doubt I'll get an answer, no one else ever seems to have, and given that the site seems largely to work pretty well, I'm not going to campaign actively for it to be run differently.

But I'm not the only one, and I'm disappointed that despite trying to stay within the guidelines, despite submitting stuff I think the community will find interesting, and despite thinking carefully about how I vote and why I vote, somehow I've fallen foul of the system.

Sufficiently disappointed that I don't think I'll take so much care in the future.

Yes, you are correct: you will not take so much care in the future.

People are wonderful pattern recognizers. Show them a system where you vote up and things go up and you vote down and things go down? They grok it. Where you punish people by down-voting them and reward them by up=voting? Makes sense.

But start mucking around so sometimes when you vote up the article goes down? Or sometimes you can vote and sometimes you can't? Or you can't vote now, but you can vote in 12 hours? Or you can vote for this guy, but not this other?

Eventually they just say "Screw it. It's effectively either random or designed especially to piss me off. Therefore I will not take it seriously"

Oddly enough, the more attached people are to the gaming/karma aspects of the site, the more this will annoy them. Also the more annoyed they are, the more likely they are to start gaming the system -- since in their minds the system isn't giving them a "fair shake" to begin with.

Lots of interesting insights into human behavior with complex systems here. Of course I'm just speculating, but it's important stuff for anybody running a public site.

The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.

I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.

If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job.

Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.

That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.

If I understood the OP, their issue is not that they don't feel like a special snowflake - it's that this is a site that is driven, among other things, by the warm fuzziness of user contribution, predominantly expressed by voting, and that if users get the feeling that voting is irrelevant this might cause a lot of users to stop contributing.

While one can always say, correctly, "It's PG's site and he can do what he like with it", I think it is fair to comment on things like "if my vote doesn't count, showing me the button regardless and eliciting my vote seems unfair". If The Great Algorithm In The Sky has decided my vote doesn't count, I think it is fair to indicate this to me in some way.

My comment average is 4.24 right now so I am presumably not affected - who knows?, but I sympathise with the essence of the OP's argument. I also sympathise with PG's attempts to maintain the integrity of the site in the face of increasing popularity. I think the issue is not the why, it is the how.

I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently.

I'm just confused.

Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.

On the positive side, he is very responsive to people with problems who are sincere about working with him. Almost everybody who has ever been banned and made a good-faith effort to work with him has gotten unbanned. From what I've seen, this pretty much always happens via email. As others have mentioned, that's the go-to communication method for people with problems.

I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant. Seriously. It's just the internet.

That would probably be impolite :)

> I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant

Please read Riders explanation. There are automatic triggers which stop your votes counting for an unknown period of time if you trigger them. Not a conspiracy; requests for information on this have been posted a couple of times before.

I certainly wouldn't bother him.

Personally, I don't care much about this. Though when I start a topic here asking for help, I feel that I should thank those who helped me by upvoting their comments.

In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.

But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit.

I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners.

FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN.

Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.

That might explain your observation.

But that's my point -- there's all kinds of little nuances and "if X, then Y" in the system and hell if I have time to keep on top of all of it. To my mind, it seems a reasonable assumption that there is a mad sysadmin somewhere just screwing around with me. After all, in the past for most boards limiting voting or tweaking ranking or turning on or off features was traditionally handled by a person, not an algorithm. Maybe it's some super-duper cool collaborative voting checker that's working wrong or maybe somebody just had a bad day. As a user, beats me -- and once I have to start second-guessing who is doing what to me and why the site is totally screwed. In my opinion.

You shouldn't have to be on HN everyday and read all the pages to understand how the site works. That's an idiotic expectation.

By the way, I'm commenting on all user sites with non-intuitive behavior, not just the peculiarities of HN.

(sigh)

Is security through obscurity really a good idea in this day and age?

Just because I keep my ssh servers up to date (disable passwords, root login, etc), doesn't mean I don't gain anything by having them listen a high port. The moment a 0-Day exploit is found (or maybe another Debian key generation bug) the security of not showing up on every script kiddies initial scans looking for unpatched ssh servers is worth something.

My overall perspective on any online forum's forum rules is that I just deal with them. I don't take any set of rules personally. I don't assume any kind of enforcement action or limitation on my own forum participation is directed at me as an individual, but rather is a forum management response to forum issues. If I enjoy a forum, I keep right on participating. If I don't enjoy a forum, I take my participation elsewhere without feeling offended. I happen to like HN a lot. To each their own.

As to specific observations of voting behavior, to the best of my knowledge and belief, when I upvote a comment or submission, and when I downvote a comment, my votes immediately change the score of the item I have just voted on. I try in my own mind to upvote more often than downvote, but I have no way to keep track of my actual count of votes up or down. I do like to clean up the comments, so I definitely downvote from time to time, and sometimes in bursts of downvotes in one thread. Unless I am wholly mistaken in my observation, my votes count as ups or downs on those items, in real time. It has been my observation that my own personal karma score will sometimes be stable for hours at a time, even if I have made new comments or submitted new articles, and it may be (I don't know) that I am running into some automated response of the site software such that my karma score is frozen if I have just been downvoting repeatedly. But it often seems that overnight, or after a while, my personal karma score becomes unstuck, and anyway I don't worry about this too much. I look at my threads view from time to time both to see if anyone has replied to any of my comments and to see what the aggregate votes are on those comments. If I am below 1 in aggregate score on some comment I have made, I try to think why readers would decide to downvote it. If I see someone else get a conspicuously high net score on a comment in a thread where I have also commented, I try to figure out what he or she did right to achieve commendation from other participants. As long as the site in general is worth reading and interesting to me, I don't especially worry about how its voting behavior is implemented. It's fun for me to learn from other participants here what kind of rules are visible in the source code and what kind of incentives may be designed by management to keep the conversation worthwhile. Since 1992, I have been a moderator on one or another of a variety of online forums, and I'm always deeply curious about what makes online communities successful and valuable to participants. I think HN is doing a good job.

P.S. I like many of RiderOfGiraffes's submissions and comments, and have certainly upvoted more than a few (and perhaps downvoted none of them). I too recall some thread in which pg mentioned RiderOfGiraffes favorably, although I don't have the link at hand. I would regret seeing RiderOfGiraffes leaving the site or changing his username, because I like to see familiar usernames as a clue that a comment or submission will be worth a read.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr

Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.).

The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable.

I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power).

Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else.

But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?)

I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too.

Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.

I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something."

I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship.

Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away.

PS, please ban me.

I should just follow my own advice and devolve into Tourette's syndrome. fuck you, you chinchilla rapist. (nothing personal.)

anyway, ALSO, none of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is that HN's karma system incubates various dysfunctions, and that anyone who sets up any kind of points system on a social site is going to be setting up the rules of a game that people will then play and be emotionally invested in winning.

curious game, the only way to win is not to play. I'm going to throw away my password to this account, log out, and see how long I can last before starting account #4.

But yeah, communication is often minimally useful. And I get that the pollution of motivation caused by social app incentives make make it even less so. It seems that without these incentives things tend to fall down in different ways, but maybe my experience of qualities communities that don't rely on social app incentives is limited.

[And chincilla is mischaracterizing what happened between us: it was my understanding that it was consensual.]

I'm just saying that a web site that makes a person unhappy is not a good thing for them to be part of, and as someone who comes back repeatedly, despite being banned, to me it looks as if your desire to come back, despite being disenfranchised, is a sure sign of dysfunction. my coming back is certainly dysfunctional, but here I am. people dig the site in spite of its dysfunctions, but it sure would be cool if PG et al just threw the dysfunctional parts away.

With this little rant about feeling like they're 'wasting time' because a counter isn't being incremented with an arbitrary points system, it's obvious there's at least some people out there that absolutely need this add-on to contribute positively.