Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
The irony is that karma posts are so easy. Take something most of your audience already agrees with, triple down on some reductionist caricature of it, and smother it in pithy glibness. The shorter the better. Particularly effective if you set up a false dichotomy vis-a-vis the person you're replying to. It's a reflexive style of engagement for many, and HN is not immune to it.
I aim to avoid it these days, with varying degrees of success. I don't need fictitious internet points, I want to hear other people's genuine thoughts on a subject of interest. Or sometimes just to share something I thought was neat.
But since all social media are Pavlovian conditioning for points, you rarely get any fruitful exchange. And it seems to be getting rarer and rarer, sadly.
I wonder how one would structure social media to avoid it. HN is good, but the karma system is a double edged sword. Would it increase the quality of the discussion to retain the use of points for ranking posts, but hide point counts completely? Perhaps they could be represented by words: "Positive response", "negative response", but only past -3 and +3, with no changes in wording beyond that score?
Wrt my own posts I like the karma system as feedback for how well I'm getting my point across. Helps to understand what communication style resonates with people. I'd say the biggest flaw is not that it rewards snarky popular opinions, but that it overly rewards first movers on a topic.
I do think that pithy is good. The real world also rewards people who can convey an idea succinctly. ("Healthcare for all" for example is an effective rallying cry despite lack of implementation details.)
If it were an effective rallying cry, it would have worked at any point in the last forty years.
Politics is not assessed in terms of how the slogans sound, but what they achieve. Universal healthcare is further away today than it was in the '90s, and Democrats are less 'rallied' than ever.
