I'd love to say no. But at some point (years ago), I started keeping an eye on it just so I'd reach the threshold for the downvoting privilege (1000 I believe). And the habit never went away.

> Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

No. Wanting to see "number go up" has probably made me comment and participate more, given an extra little push when I had something to say but been unsure whether it's worth commenting about.

That's an option? Or do you use some sort of user style/extension for to do that?

It's a well kept secret.

And I've been much happier since I stopped looking at it, but every now and then I fall off the wagon and sneak a peek.

> HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.

The problem isn't HN and the hivemind. The problem here is you. You still care about the points (or rather the consequences of them) because you take the trouble to create a throwaway account, so that when your post is upvoted, or downvoted, you don't feel tied to it.

If you truly didn't care you would either:

1) stop posting on here altogether 2) not care about what others thought of your comments, and stop using throwaway accounts.

I've always felt like HN should display the upvotes/comments ratio rather than raw karma. It would be like the accuracy number in xonotic's insta-gib mode: you shoot carefully and precisely rather than spraying and praying.

Yes, you would. Criticizing and complaining about HN is popular on HN.

I think you nailed it though, it's the "points" thing. You're creating an incentive for people to desperately say witty things to get more points, but when people forcefully try to be witty or helpful they end up being formulaic in the worst way ... they find patterns that people almost always approve of and use that.

I wonder what would happen if you actually hide all the numbers ... all karma/etc is still there, just not visible to the user.

While the effect isn't overwhelming, making the content of a limited pool of 'thought leaders' more prevalent is certainly the bias that a karma system is intended to create. Of course HN presupposes that high karma correlates to high quality content and a high quality user, which is probably why as I understand it, karma gets used as a weight for things like the effect of flagging or downvoting. But if they didn't want it to be a popularity contest, I would assume they wouldn't make user karma public. You don't give people a metric without expecting it to be gamed.

I went through some and it doesn't seem so. Yes, he is opinionated, but so are many HN-ers. His set of opinions is quite specific though (based on the comments I see, MS SQL Server users are a minority here, for example) so you might have that impression.

> How he’s ended up with so much karma

We're supposed to be adults but we still fall for this behavior engineering trick called karma. Really, who cares? What does it change in my life if I have a few points more or less?

One could even argue that you can create more value for the community by lowering your karma, making comments that are alien to the collective mindhive. A downvote is almost impulsive in such cases, but your comment (before it greys out) can spark a thought, an interest, an idea, or even some important doubt that would otherwise not arise.

That's a pretty interesting idea. I like it. I don't know of any community that has tried this.

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 agree. But not just there. Here too. I feel I do not always express myself like I would were there no karma points to be earned/lost. I often wish for a karma-less HN .

Edit. Because I get micro depressed when I loose karma and I start to question myself. I feel I shouldn't care because I look upon myself as strong, well-behaved, clever. But I do care. Immensely.

I take screenshots of the funny numbers

> Has the fear of losing your HN karma ever stopped you from expressing yourself?

I have plenty of karma. The most I can lose from any one comment is 5. There’s not much downside to posting things here, which can be a good or a bad thing. Personally I rarely actually get to -4. If you’re articulate and not a jerk to people it’s rare that you’ll be significantly downvoted. Bonus points if you’re also correct.

Just for the record, karma is a useless metric to me. It gives visibility into how one of my submissions performs, but that's it. I don't chase karma.

> It looks like it falls in addictive experiences

Addiction is when a thing controls you, and you don't control it. I am in charge of my experience here on HN, and as I said, I don't chase upvotes & karma.

Well, first, I don't like calling total karma reputation. Established users on HN definitely are likely to have a reputation as well as a karma aggregate, but the two aren't closely related.

Second, I don't see the problem. It's only an issue if karma total is a metric you are trying to manage, but that's not a behavior I think HN wants to do more to encourage.

The points displayed next to your name are on a per-comment level though. Changing accounts doesn't affect anything about that. I've literally never clicked through to see anyone's total karma count until I just tried it for you. I think you're overestimating how much people care about any of this, and thus over-compensating in your response to it by constantly creating new accounts.

Occasionally getting downvoted not withstanding, a user's karma tends to only go up over time, as long as the account isn't flagged in any way. It's generally not a battle between negative and positive karma - getting downvoted is more of a short-term signal that others found the quality of your post wanting. So in an environment where there are many more upvotes than downvotes, a 500 karma limit is merely a means to stop novice users from dishing out punishment until they become more experienced users.

Downvoting a comment sends a harsh signal to the commenter that you believe their comment is so bad it shouldn't be there, but it's an unsuitable tool to influence the discussion at large.

> Why was it raised?

I've been here a few years and to my knowledge the limit wasn't raised during that time.

> If karma doesn't work to exclude people with unpopular opinions then there's no point to the limit.

As someone who mostly only posts if he has something contrarian to say, I don't think it's about unpopular opinions. Yes, I receive some downvotes, but mostly people just ignore me, so my average comment karma is very low. That's what you can expect for having unpopular or boring opinions. Reaching the karma threshold necessary for downvoting on the other hand isn't really that big of a deal, nor is it really a challenge.

HN's primary exclusion mechanism is flagging, not downvoting. In a way it's more insidious because you may not even notice it's happening. People get shadowbanned, even. Or, as apparently happened to me yesterday for the first time as far as I can tell, a moderator steps in and forcefully pushes your comment below the much older "green newbie" comments where the thoroughly grey content goes to die.

Downvoting is at least an overt signal, like I said. And personally I think the capability to issue a downvote is probably overrated.

> tilt the discussion toward their viewpoint

Discussions on HN are generally not happening on the razor's edge of opinions. Instead, they tend to be carried out by people who are very certain of their own viewpoint. There is so much momentum, tilting these things is not an issue. But if you can voice a coherent minority opinion, that comment might still get to the top of the thread.

> Surely you must have noticed how cliquey HN is.

It depends, I think there are several big blocks of people here who think alike, but I noticed the biggest influence on how a post is received often seems timezone-related.

Hi there from my 2nd account! I have also abandoned about 1K points of karma, because I thought I should censor myself less and care less about it.

Surprisingly, I didn't get downvoted as much as I expected. Lot of comments I make and consider really silly get high karma, and yet other my comments which I consider to be a really good points are sitting there with 1. The moderation system seems quite random.

I think the big problem of modern moderation systems is the fleeting nature of all those discussions. Having a persistent discussion about a topic is difficult. I think something like Wiki or Stackoverflow works, but only to an extent.

IME, you can earn a lot of karma quickly with links. I'd say 1/3 of my karma came from links, and initially that's what pushed me over the top. So they're most likely not new users, but anyone with a month of submissions could have crossed that threshold. It makes me wonder if the two karmas, and the features that get enabled, should be separate things.

works for me everywhere except HN, because of the silly requirement of 500 karma to be able to downvote.