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 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).