The other thing that didn't hit me is that I enjoy commenting on things that are on the "new" page -many of those stories don't make it to the front page and as a result comments don't get replied to or upmodded as much.
Forget commenting on anything that won't hit the front page.
Also forget commenting later on in a story when it gets stale. Best to hit a hot story when it is fresh and a lot of other people will be piling on later.
I'm amazed that you would have a karma system, special colored status indicators, and yet people would still claim that it doesn't affect user behavior.
That's the point, guys. If the karma/colored system didn't affect user behavior, it wouldn't be there
Create a game, and people will play it as a game. Put a number next to someone or a color and people will change behavior to change the color/number. Especially hacker/gamer/competitive males, which are clearly represented pretty well here at HN.
That's a really good point. I thought that maybe you could solve this by dividing the story karma by the comment karma, but then you get the opposite effect; it hurts you to make a new comment on a front-page item and helps you to make one on a less-upvoted item. Maybe that itself would be a good thing.
Another approach would be to normalize the comment's score against the other comments on that story, and use a threshold on that. If there were 4 comments with karmas 1 to 4 and another story with 100 comments from 1 to 100, the 4 on the first would be just as good as the 100 on the second. That might be too much work, though ;)
I've found that much of my karma has come from commenting on stories on the New page. Yeah, many don't make it to the front page - but the ones that do haven't been seen by many people, and so when they do, everyone reads your comment and hopefully upvotes it.
It's much like startups. Many of them fail, but the ones that succeed tend to succeed big.
