Really? I have a pretty good karma balance and I generally say whatever I want with 0 fucks given about down votes. Maybe you should be less obsessive about it.
It seems to me that the argument “the design is fine because you shouldn’t even care about this feature” is wrong.
That a significant number of people seem to think comments like this have some value seems to me to be a bug in typical human reasoning, not a feature.
If the feature exists, it is hard for me to guess how one would not get value from paying attention to the users of the feature in optimizing its design.
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.
As for me, I care about the karma scores of each comment of mine (because they show me whether readers think my comments are insightful, out of whack, or neither in particular), but not about my total karma (so that when I’m asked to pay a toll to reply to a heavily downvoted thread, I hit “Proceed anyway” with no hesitation). Likewise, the score of all of my latest twenty comments decreases by 1 in 10 minutes I realize that someone is just being a jerk, and don’t sweat it as much as if my net karma decreased by 20 in a several-hour period but with certain comments being downvoted by 2, certain by 1, certain not downvoted, and certain upvoted.
Really? I have a pretty good karma balance and I generally say whatever I want with 0 fucks given about down votes. Maybe you should be less obsessive about it.
It seems to me that the argument “the design is fine because you shouldn’t even care about this feature” is wrong.
That a significant number of people seem to think comments like this have some value seems to me to be a bug in typical human reasoning, not a feature.
If the feature exists, it is hard for me to guess how one would not get value from paying attention to the users of the feature in optimizing its design.
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.
As for me, I care about the karma scores of each comment of mine (because they show me whether readers think my comments are insightful, out of whack, or neither in particular), but not about my total karma (so that when I’m asked to pay a toll to reply to a heavily downvoted thread, I hit “Proceed anyway” with no hesitation). Likewise, the score of all of my latest twenty comments decreases by 1 in 10 minutes I realize that someone is just being a jerk, and don’t sweat it as much as if my net karma decreased by 20 in a several-hour period but with certain comments being downvoted by 2, certain by 1, certain not downvoted, and certain upvoted.