I would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for having a random username assigned to every one of my posts with my history being obscured while still keeping track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.
The same point everywhere - to drive discussion to popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to encourage conformity to board culture through operant conditioning and gamification. If you give people a number and tell them that number is special, they'll do whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid whatever makes it go down.
At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated) assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)
You are stealing: downvote. You are playing music too loud: downvote, right away. Driving too fast: downvote. Slow: downvote. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you get downvoted. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, Downvote. You overcook chicken, also downvote. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, downvote, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of downvoting.
I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they don't like, and any individual will have different rules about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.
Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful", "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
Can't disagree with this enough. Twitter exists, and it sucks. Every site that only allows upvoting becomes a segregated cesspool as different factions just cheerlead in their own tribal zones.
I wonder how it would work if we had different kinds of upvote/downvote.
Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick second if it is a disagreement about something they feel strongly about
When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong, etc.
But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm always curious about what the issue was. I think potentially valuable information and personal learning is lost.
In my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.
Not sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or just the voting system in general. In either case, just for a start, I think discussions are easier to have & follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment to engage in the discussion vs posting something like "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering), whether your total karma is displayed or not.
