Ask HN: Wouldn't it make sense to calculate karma on comments, not submissions?
It seems irrelevant and unrelated to a specific user that an article that is picked at random and heavily discussed gives the submitter a large number of karma points while the submitters not 'chosen' but who have contributed in equal measure ( and often earlier than the one upvoted ) receive nothing.
One would think, this being a community, upvoted comments would be a much more useful measure for karma, possibly the only one needed ?
16 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadI feel your proposition would not affect this goal in a good way.
By putting a karma threshold on actions like flagging or downvoting, HN ensures that these actions can't be done by someone who has just created a throwaway account to harass people.
Regardless of personality or politics, most can rightly agree that things like "Fancy Euclid's “Elements” in TeX" or "Text rendering using multi channel signed distance fields" are noteworthy accomplishments.
What some asshole thinks about those things, and what a bunch of other assholes think about his thinking, are neither here nor there--this comment included.
Some commenters are experts in their field, and their comments are worth reading. For example, I've learned more about security by reading tptacek's comments than I have by reading articles on security.
But how does it make sense to give 400 points to a submitter out of 5 who posted the same thing ? And often to an article which may not be neither the first, nor the best about the issue. That's what I mean by entirely random.
Furthermore, without threads and comments HN would just be another link aggregator from some relatively fixed sources.
And you prove my point about comments mentioning a-holes, in that useless ones would be downvoted while useful or informative ones would be upvoted, and quite rightly bestow karma and benefits to contributors deserving it. That would make sense. You wouldn't see actual a-holes, they'd be downvoted to oblivion.
Maybe if HN consistently registered the first submitted link and marked all others as dupes automatically. Even so, still seems a flawed reward system.
Still wrong in my view, and worth giving more value to comments. I've already commented anyway, not sure why HN does not automatically register the first time a link is submitted and redirect the rest to the first one.
Like I said, I upvote all submitters of the same article because otherwise it seems wrong given how karma works now. But we shouldn't have to do that.
Edit : * With the exception of Ask HN or Show HN, I suppose. But the vast majority of links are from external sites and submitted several times by different users.
I agree that there's an issue with randomness about which submission of an article gets the karma. It's on our list to do something about that. But it does even out in the long run for anyone who submits many good stories. And I don't think most HN users care about karma too much.