[mastersummoner]

I'm glad you're thinking about this. It's always strange to search for a topic, and find a dozen hits, most with one post max, and one which went absolutely viral.

In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.

[codetrotter]

> In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.

For the most part I think it doesn’t happen that much on HN. There are maybe a handful of people that I recognize by name because of their volume of comments. But I don’t normally look at or consider how much karma someone has or hasn’t got when I read random comments from random people.

HN took steps specifically to avoid some of the negative effects of karma influencing how comments are perceived by removing the display of how many points each comment has in the discussion under each post.

Usually the only time I click through to someone’s profile specifically to look at their karma is if they said something that seemed purposefully inflammatory and I’m wondering if they have a habit of trolling (and therefore have very low karma), or if it was just a one-off thing that maybe came out wrong or maybe they’re just having a particularly bad day today. Or maybe I’m even just misinterpreting as inflammatory what was not meant like that by them.

But if you do want to know how much karma those that have the most have, since you’re bringing up the topic of karma, there’s also this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

The karma leaderboard.

[dang]

> karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation

I hope not!

[mastersummoner]

Much less here than on, say, Reddit. But it's not nothing!

[Andrex]

I wonder if instead of a number, users are told what their "karmic trend" is.

Like if your last three comments got upvotes, it would say "you're trending good" or something (and vice versa for downvotes). People's monkey brains get too focused on a single number which inevitably gets tied to their identity/reputation, even on a place like HN where it's essentially invisible.

I wouldn't lose a wink if you decided to hide the karma system completely from us HN users, but I'm sure some would.