zlacker

One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It’s a bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your messages.

>>xwdv+(OP)
You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973. We recently restored the code to mostly work the way it did before that, so this effect should be less strong than it was. On the other hand, if you were to do a slightly better job of using HN in the intended spirit (and sticking to the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), we'd be happy to take the penalty off your account. The problem is that you're still posting comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954.

It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.

>>xwdv+(OP)
if i may, some constructive feedback...

try to make something like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xwdv

more like this:

[edit deln.] How can you want to be part of something when you don’t even know what it’s like on the inside?

What happens when you are given a task you do NOT want to be part of? What happens when a task has moral gray area? What happens if you suddenly decide you really want to be part of something else?

[edit deln] if you’re hiring someone you want someone with valuable skills who is ready to be of service, ready to do whatever you ask, and will remain loyal so long as they are paid. You don’t want people to be nice, you want them to be predictable. That’s true value.

>>dang+eX
It must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a modest boost, rising out from the negatives.

Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post.

A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.