Karma is a tricky thing. I've been playing around with a toy version of HN for a couple of days now to see if I can somehow find a better way to use the 'votes' in order to maximize the user experience on the site.
Karma is only one aspect of that.
Every time a user votes a submission (or a comment) up or down there is a complex relationship between the two users.
It is based on any combination of the following factors:
- quality
- like / dislike
- agreement / disagreement
- mood of the voting user
To mine all those from a single click it is necessary to track those clicks over many interactions. Only that way does it become possible to get a sense of what is on the users mind when he/she clicks that 'vote' link.
Votes on urls that are submitted are not subject to the 'agreement / disagreement' element, but all the others apply.
Allowing people to 'climb' faster based on click patterns is a very complex data mining issue. The 'dummy buttons' idea is an interesting one, to some extent this already happens on HN (the up/down vote buttons do not always work the way you think they do).
One hard thing to achieve is to get rid of the effect simply measuring karma has on HN. Because the users see the points and the karma they collect there is a feedback loop in HN that tends to get out of hand.
Comments posted early on in a thread will get some karma regardless of how good they are in the longer term.
Ideally a 'good' user (so one that in the long term will acquire access to all the features) should be identified early, but then that would open the door to gaming the system even further. The road up the hill is pretty quick anyway for most users, as far as I can see you get all the goodies from 200 points upwards (other than administrator privileges), an active user could collect that in a week, and by then will be reasonably well versed in HN etiquette to not abuse these powers.
Comments
Karma is a tricky thing. I've been playing around with a toy version of HN for a couple of days now to see if I can somehow find a better way to use the 'votes' in order to maximize the user experience on the site.
Karma is only one aspect of that.
Every time a user votes a submission (or a comment) up or down there is a complex relationship between the two users.
It is based on any combination of the following factors:
- quality
- like / dislike
- agreement / disagreement
- mood of the voting user
To mine all those from a single click it is necessary to track those clicks over many interactions. Only that way does it become possible to get a sense of what is on the users mind when he/she clicks that 'vote' link.
Votes on urls that are submitted are not subject to the 'agreement / disagreement' element, but all the others apply.
Allowing people to 'climb' faster based on click patterns is a very complex data mining issue. The 'dummy buttons' idea is an interesting one, to some extent this already happens on HN (the up/down vote buttons do not always work the way you think they do).
One hard thing to achieve is to get rid of the effect simply measuring karma has on HN. Because the users see the points and the karma they collect there is a feedback loop in HN that tends to get out of hand.
Comments posted early on in a thread will get some karma regardless of how good they are in the longer term.
Ideally a 'good' user (so one that in the long term will acquire access to all the features) should be identified early, but then that would open the door to gaming the system even further. The road up the hill is pretty quick anyway for most users, as far as I can see you get all the goodies from 200 points upwards (other than administrator privileges), an active user could collect that in a week, and by then will be reasonably well versed in HN etiquette to not abuse these powers.