I'm wondering if people are becoming karma obsessed. Karma ratings forces you to think before posting but up mods and down mods are so opinionated. Often a snappy response to a good point gets up modded more than the good point. It goes back to my question are we posting just for karma?
Nah, I usually just post if I have something to contribute. And like others have pointed out, there's no point worrying about Karma past a certain level anyway... it's not like the stuff really buys you anything.
Then again, maybe there's a micro-currency / digital cash based startup waiting to be had here... "Spend your HN Karma Points Now!" LOL.
Karma, I admit is a bit of a game mechanic to me. I get really excited when I pick up a point or two. However, I am also new around here, and thus have not accumulated enough to make it not exciting.
interesting, commenting about not having much karma got me a karma point! -does a happy game mechanic induced dance-
I had been reading HN for about a year before making an account, and honestly I think it is one of the "nicest" communities online I have yet to find, and I think the self-regulating ability of 'karma' is part of that.
Karma is really a "black swan" thing: sometimes you get one or two points, sometimes you lose a point because people don't agree with you and downvote you, and once in a while you post something totally innocuous (but potentially well-informed) and suddenly they're all over your post and you get as more upvotes than for all these carefully-formulated snippets of distilled thought.
The community quality is, IMO, helped by the fact that there are dictatorial interventions to prune the few trolls that can survive in a karma-based community. (The legend is that some people are made to live in their own editorial padded cell where their HN posts can only ever be seen by themselves).
I mostly comment because I like to get a bit snarky. Karma is a scorekeeper--did I annoy people, or strike a chord?
I also like to share my views on things, but generally I post about things that I don't feel too deeply about. Several times I've gotten very angry and composed a detailed, thorough rebuttal, only to delete it because I don't want to get so involved.
In my case karma has the opposite effect on commenting. In fear of getting down voted I tend to avoid making comments. In reality this is just my fear of failure/getting rejected manifestating, but unless my eagerness/curiosity/certainty threshold is high enough I avoid the risk altogether.
The problem is that until I get over this exact sentiment/mindset I will just keep enriching my personal collection of thoughts or proof of concept applications and never, really, release anything. Sigh
On the other hand, I did not create an account on HN as a means to popularity, and since getting a new one is so easy I shouldn't care, but alas I do.
Are any of us really super concerned about our karma rating? Don't get me wrong, it is a great little perk; however, I doubt the community at large is biting their nails in concern over their rating. Although, I did learn in this thread that there is a threshold where you can start down voting items depending on karma? Completely unaware of this.
