What? I can't do more than just silently upvote if I have nothing to add? The "karma" here means nothing when you think about it - you lose karma in the real world with your purposeless negation.
It surely does affect sorting or silencing unpopular voices, but unless it's a top-level comment, it doesn't really matter. Plus, most people who one should care about when making the effort to post a comment, read at least all top comments and scan the rest. Second-level and deeper comments usually get lost unless they are attached to a "popular" top comment or the discussion is small. Also, if you have a unpopular opinion, you should be scared to reply to a reply as the same people who downvoted your first comment and invest their time in downvoting the reply as well. The commenting system here is prehistoric and lacks basic understanding of psychology. It stimulate ass kissers, not people with unique views and unpopular opinions that can actually add some additional perspectives to otherwise the monotonous highfiving.
Never said you can downvote a reply, but this gives more privileges to the silent downvoters as they keep downvoting and waiting others do the work and keep downvoting. I know this as in most cases, my unpopular comments get the same negative score (well, usually having -4, to be fair). I've seen some cowards who delete their comments when they start getting downvotes, which breaks the discussion as well and makes the replies out-of-context.
How can a -4 comment be "noise" if there are tons of replies? I often have a root comment with -4 and then tens and at times hundreds of comments underneath?
The comment regime on HN is broken. Down voting is anonymous & carries zero social cost. The fact of a homogenous karma space is a contributing factor: user x /may/ have gained karma points based on input on subject matters that have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
And I agree with you regarding the real world karma consequences of this for HN :)
HN is very important, but it is also greatly neglected. I'm not sure if the goal is not to compete with some of the startups or if Paul Graham has some future plans about it. Unfortunately, due to loyalty, people keep sticking in here even if better alternatives pop up from time to time. Some of those being Lobsters [0] and Monocle [1].
I think the problems you describe are with people (so therefore should be dealt with through community standards etc.), not the karma system. How would you improve it?
The karma system is a crowd-sourced pseudo-automated, and greatly imperfect system to enforce community standards. It's not even using the "wisdom of the crowds" as it's mixing different things into a single meaningless number. It has some completely random ranges that give you different privileges (read "lift restrictions").
I haven't really thought about this, but here are some changes that I would borrow from here and there with some that I haven't seen elsewhere:
- a downvote costs you something (a karma point or half a point) ala StackExchange, which makes you think twice before you're urged to punish;
- categorize votes ala BuzzFeed reactions insteading mindlessly up-/downvoting;
- your karma gets a share of the collective karma of your reply tree - those who start vivid discussions should be rewarded;
- reward with own karma - if you really like somebody's comment, why not donate some of your own karma and reward quality comments with more than 1 point;
- there's no point to keep punishing somebody for their multiple replies - this silences voices; you should be able to pick and rate the overall participation of somebody in the thread, not punish them multiple times for each attempt for them to convey the same thing.
I don't even see a downvote button. When I came here first I thought nice you can only upvote here, so the community must be nice. Got down voted pretty quickly. What does even green username mean?
From some discussion earlier today, you must have a collective score of 500 upvotes before you have the ability to downvote. I would guess that is to enforce a period where new accounts can get used to the generally accepted standards for discussion here.
