I don’t. Karma is a proxy for whether the community wants to hear from you. You can predictably go against that—I sometimes do—but there should generally be a strong reason behind it. Karma is a proxy sign for whether you’re being helpful, not an accumulated resource that can be burned.
This is exactly the interpretation that I formed of Karma after my brief exchange with… with… I forget who, but it was an Eastern European Gentleman. In it, he said he downvoted a comment due to it being vague and repetitious. So, I did a quick study of those comments that were strongly upvoted and discovered that the vast majority had contributed something to the dialog.
Although, not having a lot of Karma has led me to be rather slow to post anything as a main blog post where the Karma seems to have more weight (if I am interpreting this correctly). I do have something I have been working on, but the “Karma to Burn” does make me hesitant to post something that could send my karma score into the negative.
Just for the record, this was not an instance of intentionally burning karma on a post that I knew people weren’t going to like. I’m not saying I would never do that, but I have never done it and have no immediate plans to.
There’s a delicate balance to be struck though: people game the karma system enough as it is. No karma system is ungameable, and greater resistance to gaming means more coding effort.
I strongly endorse the perspective on karma this comment displays.
I don’t. Karma is a proxy for whether the community wants to hear from you. You can predictably go against that—I sometimes do—but there should generally be a strong reason behind it. Karma is a proxy sign for whether you’re being helpful, not an accumulated resource that can be burned.
This is exactly the interpretation that I formed of Karma after my brief exchange with… with… I forget who, but it was an Eastern European Gentleman. In it, he said he downvoted a comment due to it being vague and repetitious. So, I did a quick study of those comments that were strongly upvoted and discovered that the vast majority had contributed something to the dialog.
Although, not having a lot of Karma has led me to be rather slow to post anything as a main blog post where the Karma seems to have more weight (if I am interpreting this correctly). I do have something I have been working on, but the “Karma to Burn” does make me hesitant to post something that could send my karma score into the negative.
Just for the record, this was not an instance of intentionally burning karma on a post that I knew people weren’t going to like. I’m not saying I would never do that, but I have never done it and have no immediate plans to.
You can encourage or enforce your perspective with:
Display karma next to user names everywhere so it’s easily visible and can actually serve as a measure of deference.
Make downvotes count double, triple, or more.
There’s a delicate balance to be struck though: people game the karma system enough as it is. No karma system is ungameable, and greater resistance to gaming means more coding effort.
I think we still got ways to go before we run into diminishing returns.