Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged.
I think this is a feature, generally, but I get what you're saying. With any criteria you present for deciding what is worth posting you run the risk of it being the only criteria. Ideally, we'd all only care about our karma insofar as it helps us avoid making lousy posts, and ignore it entirely otherwise, but idealism doesn't scale.
"How will this influence my average?" is definitely an oversimplified heuristic for deciding what is worth contributing, but it's reasonably accurate and I think it's the best one we've got. (Better than total karma at the very least.)
As I said in the above comment, the voting on comments is the closest thing we have to an indication of their quality. It obviously doesn't always reflect reality, but what that points to is that some comments--the ones that we want around here but that would bring your average down--are undervalued. Those comments should result in positive feedback (via average karma or otherwise), but they don't.
That is to say: The site has a reward mechanism (karma). There is desirable behavior that is not being rewarded or is under-rewarded (e.g. replying to less popular Ask HN posts). Is there some way to reward that desirable behavior?
Comments
Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged.
I think this is a feature, generally, but I get what you're saying. With any criteria you present for deciding what is worth posting you run the risk of it being the only criteria. Ideally, we'd all only care about our karma insofar as it helps us avoid making lousy posts, and ignore it entirely otherwise, but idealism doesn't scale.
"How will this influence my average?" is definitely an oversimplified heuristic for deciding what is worth contributing, but it's reasonably accurate and I think it's the best one we've got. (Better than total karma at the very least.)
As I said in the above comment, the voting on comments is the closest thing we have to an indication of their quality. It obviously doesn't always reflect reality, but what that points to is that some comments--the ones that we want around here but that would bring your average down--are undervalued. Those comments should result in positive feedback (via average karma or otherwise), but they don't.
That is to say: The site has a reward mechanism (karma). There is desirable behavior that is not being rewarded or is under-rewarded (e.g. replying to less popular Ask HN posts). Is there some way to reward that desirable behavior?