I'm considering adding an additional layer of protection against grumps: to only allow users as many downvotes as they've made upvotes. That way each user's net contribution to the global karma would be at least neutral.

I think the grumps might just upvote something random to get points to use against something they don't like. The result of upvoting something that's at 10 points is weaker than downvoting something at 1 point. Maybe take current score into account.

Or possibly just put a limit on the number of downvotes you can do per day/week. We don't need nearly as many downvote points as upvote points to get good results. Viewing and not upvoting something is like half a downvote anyway. Maybe if you reply when past your limit you can then also downvote if you want.

> Viewing and not upvoting something is like half a downvote anyway.

This statement depends a lot on your habits. I open up 5-10 links at a time and then read through them all. I rarely remember to go back and upvote, and I reserve that for _really_ good articles, anyway. And of course you can't say anything about comments, since there's no telling whether somebody even reads all the comments when he opens a page with comments on it.

Yes, somebody can just upvote 10 random things to get 10 negative 'credits.'

How are they going to use all 10 on one article? Both arrows disappear after the first vote. And, the old articles can't be voted down any more. Finally, if the person decides to wait for somebody to post 9 more comments over the next 2 weeks or however frequently the user posts (so they can downvote them) the comment will still be current and the rest of the YC community will vote up the comment back to a positive number. It seems like a good solution to me.

Why don't you publish the top 3 or 5 folks who up vote and down vote the most, maybe as an additional section on the leaders page. It might effect behavior interestingly.

I'd rather just make the system quietly do the right thing. Never do through social pressure what you could do through software.

I thought it was the other way around: never try to solve a social problem with software.

The karma-neutral idea sounds like a good one, but then you remember that it's easy to create new accounts... Ultimately, you just have to depend on people to do good or leave.

A fair point, but there is a downvote threshold (20 points). Easy to overcome, but also easy to detect.

I understand. I hope news.yc doesn't become an overly serious place though.

PS: As an after-thought, social pressure may be more adaptable than software.

I am glad you're taking this seriously - reddit went down the tube (in terms of quality) mainly due to the better contributors getting tuned off by all the anti-social behaviour. advogato.org is a different kind of site - but they have a trust metric that seems to have withstood attacks pretty well - the reason I mention this is to point out the formal trust metric based approaches out there.

That's an interesting idea. Another idea would be that they would "consume" some of the karma they made, when they downvote.

I don't think that would be good. You want to encourage people to participate in a site like this. Downvoting dumb stuff is a valid contribution.

Point taken. How about the idea that the number of daily upvotes/downvotes you have available is proportional with your karma?

Is there value in karma-neutral interaction? Perhaps some users are better at up-voting and some better at down-voting.

Thank you, I just got 44 points back.

As long as we're having a meta-thread, is there any way to incorporate the site traffic into the decay function. The problem currently is that if you post something off-peak, a lot of time elapses with no one around to vote. It sucks to finish writing a blog post at 7pm and have to wait until 11am the next day to post it.

That's the main way the current plan isn't optimal. Paul Buchheit suggested I scale votes by recent activity, and I probably will do that.

It'll be interesting to see if this change would affect the content on Reddit at all. Normally if you want to ride the aggregation train the ideal strategy is to wait until you hit the top of news.yc before submitting to Reddit, and then wait until you make the front page of Reddit before submitting to Digg. If good stories start hitting the #1 spot on this site during nights or on the weekends, it could potentially have some interesting ripple effects further up the chain.

floating point karma.

I totally agree. This also effects people who are in different timezones.

Once you come up with a really, really good way to correlate karma with a user's quality of posts/comments, maybe try to come up with a purpose for karma.

The purpose of karma on any site like this (all the way back to slashdot) is to motivate people by giving them a measure of what their peers think of their contributions.

I mean a purpose that would, for example, prevent reddit from turning into digg.

I actually have a plan for this. It's built into the current sw but not turned on. It hasn't been needed so far, and may never be because of Startup News's narrow focus.

If I reuse the code to make a general news site, as I've been thinking I might, I'll certainly turn it on.

I wasn't able to downvote since I made an account. But it has its benefits; not being able to downvote or see your comments downvoted makes it a lot less stressful experience.

I should clarify: there has always been a karma threshold for downvoting. Currently it's 20. Till you have that much karma you don't see downarrows anyway.

Sounds fair.

Why not let us see who has upvoted/downvoted our comments? It's frustrating when someone downvotes without explanation, especially if it's not an obviously stupid comment.

But all posters are not created equal - what if we could consider the source? If some guy with -27 karma downvotes my comment I could care less. If it's someone like Paul Buchheit, on the other hand, I have to consider the possibility that my comment was really stupid.

It's anonymous by design, not by side effect. It's the same reason no one really knows if you voted for Bush or Kerry.

Hmmm...yeah, that makes sense. It keeps things from getting overly personal.