I appreciate the benefits of the karma system as a whole (sorting, hiding, and recommending comments based on perceived quality, as voted on by users and weighted by their own karma), but what are the benefits of specifically having the exact karma of comments be visible to anyone who reads them?
Some people in this thread have mentioned that they like that karma chugs along in the background: would it be even better if it were completely in the background, and stopped being an “Internet points” sort of thing like on all other social media? We are not immune to the effects of such things on rational thinking.
Sometimes in a discussion in comments, one party will be getting low karma on their posts, and the other high karma, and once you notice that you’ll be subject to increased bias when reading the comments. Unless we’re explicitly trying to bias ourselves towards posts others have upvoted, this seems to be operating against rationality.
Comments seem far more useful in helping writers make good posts. The “score” aspect of karma adds distracting social signaling, beyond what is necessary to keep posts prioritized properly. If I got X karma instead of Y karma for a post, it would tell me nothing about what I got right or wrong, and therefore wouldn’t help me make better posts in the future. It would only make me compare myself to everyone else and let my biases construct reasoning for the different scores.
A sort of “Popular Comment” badge could still automatically be applied to high-karma comments, if indicating that is considered valuable, but I’m not sure that it would be.
TL;DR: Hiding the explicit karma totals of comments would keep all the benefits of karma for the health of the site, reduce cognitive load on readers and writers, and reduce the impact of groupthink, with no apparent downsides. Are there any benefits to seeing such totals that I’ve overlooked?
I agree that there are benefits to hiding karma, but it seems like there are two major costs. The first is in reducing transparency; I claim that people like knowing why something is selected for them, and if karma becomes invisible the information becomes hidden in a way that people won’t like. (One could argue it should be hidden despite people’s desires, but that seems less obvious.) The other major reason is one cited by Habryka: creating common knowledge. Visible Karma scores help people gain a shared understanding of what’s valued across the site. Rankings aren’t sufficient for this, because they can’t distinguish relative quality from absolute quality (eg I’m much more likely to read a post with 200 karma, even if it’s ranked lower due to staleness than one that has 50).
I appreciate the benefits of the karma system as a whole (sorting, hiding, and recommending comments based on perceived quality, as voted on by users and weighted by their own karma), but what are the benefits of specifically having the exact karma of comments be visible to anyone who reads them?
Some people in this thread have mentioned that they like that karma chugs along in the background: would it be even better if it were completely in the background, and stopped being an “Internet points” sort of thing like on all other social media? We are not immune to the effects of such things on rational thinking.
Sometimes in a discussion in comments, one party will be getting low karma on their posts, and the other high karma, and once you notice that you’ll be subject to increased bias when reading the comments. Unless we’re explicitly trying to bias ourselves towards posts others have upvoted, this seems to be operating against rationality.
Comments seem far more useful in helping writers make good posts. The “score” aspect of karma adds distracting social signaling, beyond what is necessary to keep posts prioritized properly. If I got X karma instead of Y karma for a post, it would tell me nothing about what I got right or wrong, and therefore wouldn’t help me make better posts in the future. It would only make me compare myself to everyone else and let my biases construct reasoning for the different scores.
A sort of “Popular Comment” badge could still automatically be applied to high-karma comments, if indicating that is considered valuable, but I’m not sure that it would be.
TL;DR: Hiding the explicit karma totals of comments would keep all the benefits of karma for the health of the site, reduce cognitive load on readers and writers, and reduce the impact of groupthink, with no apparent downsides. Are there any benefits to seeing such totals that I’ve overlooked?
I agree that there are benefits to hiding karma, but it seems like there are two major costs. The first is in reducing transparency; I claim that people like knowing why something is selected for them, and if karma becomes invisible the information becomes hidden in a way that people won’t like. (One could argue it should be hidden despite people’s desires, but that seems less obvious.) The other major reason is one cited by Habryka: creating common knowledge. Visible Karma scores help people gain a shared understanding of what’s valued across the site. Rankings aren’t sufficient for this, because they can’t distinguish relative quality from absolute quality (eg I’m much more likely to read a post with 200 karma, even if it’s ranked lower due to staleness than one that has 50).