I’ve multiple times seen the recommendation to use upvotes / downvotes as a method to express a sentiment of “I’d like to see more / less of this kind of post.” It seems obvious that the people expressing such an opinion expect the recipients of the votes to care about them. It seems similarly obvious that the developers and admins of the site expect people to care about their karma at least somewhat, otherwise why have it be visible? It also seems like an entirely predictable human reaction to care about what others think of you and your actions, and karma is an expression of that.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else. I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
What did you hope to accomplish with this post? How does adding an insult about the quality of mwengler’s posts help that aim? I’m trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of your comment, but I’m not having much luck.
Actually, the only value I generally derive from visible karma is that I can then sort the comments by karma (which I do). Seeing user karma is only useful if I want to see whether other people also assume they’re a troll, and their recent history usually does the job for me just as well...
Maybe we should remove, or at least hide, karma, instead of highlighting it? Why do we show user karma and even have a “Top Contributors” list like this...?
I care about writing a quality post (occasionally). I do not care about the karma, except to the extent that I don’t want to have so little that I can’t upvote/downvote or post things, but that’s generally not a problem.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else.
Ah, the old semantic debate between “zero” and “a small number with negligible effects.”
I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
hankx7787 currently has 164 karma, which is not “high karma” by any stretch of the imagination.
I’ve multiple times seen the recommendation to use upvotes / downvotes as a method to express a sentiment of “I’d like to see more / less of this kind of post.” It seems obvious that the people expressing such an opinion expect the recipients of the votes to care about them. It seems similarly obvious that the developers and admins of the site expect people to care about their karma at least somewhat, otherwise why have it be visible? It also seems like an entirely predictable human reaction to care about what others think of you and your actions, and karma is an expression of that.
So, I suspect that you are in a minority in not caring, and I suspect you actually do care at least a little bit. Claiming not to strikes me as more signaling of social status than anything else. I am not at all surprised that it coincides with you having high karma, nor am I surprised that newbies find the karma system more intimidating than people with lots of karma.
What did you hope to accomplish with this post? How does adding an insult about the quality of mwengler’s posts help that aim? I’m trying to come up with a charitable interpretation of your comment, but I’m not having much luck.
Actually, the only value I generally derive from visible karma is that I can then sort the comments by karma (which I do). Seeing user karma is only useful if I want to see whether other people also assume they’re a troll, and their recent history usually does the job for me just as well...
Maybe we should remove, or at least hide, karma, instead of highlighting it? Why do we show user karma and even have a “Top Contributors” list like this...?
I care about writing a quality post (occasionally). I do not care about the karma, except to the extent that I don’t want to have so little that I can’t upvote/downvote or post things, but that’s generally not a problem.
Ah, the old semantic debate between “zero” and “a small number with negligible effects.”
hankx7787 currently has 164 karma, which is not “high karma” by any stretch of the imagination.