[HN Gopher] Website scores kill our success, waste our time
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       Website scores kill our success, waste our time
        
       Author : AuthorizedCust
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2021-02-20 16:53 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.arencambre.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.arencambre.com)
        
       | viseztrance wrote:
       | On stackoverflow you can spend your reputation on bounties for
       | certain questions (niche, difficult) that would otherwise get
       | ignored.
       | 
       | Personally I spent about 1000 reputation points on those, and
       | some of the answers were surprisingly good.
        
       | amarant wrote:
       | Is this guy saying you can't pay rent with internet points?
       | 
       | Huh...
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | I think there are some web scores that are actually useful. The
       | ssllabs one comes to mind.
        
       | onion2k wrote:
       | HN karma isn't important? I've wasted my life.
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Scores often don't just benefit the website owners, but arguably
       | also the other users (and thus also you). Without karma, HN could
       | be a different place.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the threshold
         | is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it has much
         | actual utility past that.
        
           | bigwavedave wrote:
           | > I think the initial ramp of karma up to whatever the
           | threshold is to allow downvotes is helpful. I'm not sure it
           | has much actual utility past that.
           | 
           | I have to agree (at least, in my case). I know that when I
           | first started here, I was a lot more reactionary and
           | frequently found myself wishing for a way to downvote people
           | who disagreed with my perspective, but I couldn't act on that
           | immaturity because of the required ramp up. I'm still human,
           | I'm still reactive- but instead of just saying "I disagree;
           | you're canceled," it's forced me to take a moment and
           | actually focus on both perspectives and the merits that other
           | paradigms offer. I'm not anywhere close to perfect, but it's
           | certainly helped me grow :).
        
       | undefined1 wrote:
       | I think scores on github, stackoverflow and HN may be a net win
       | for all concerned.
       | 
       | Twitter and Facebook scores on the other hand... a massive net
       | loss for all but Twitter, FB, their employees and shareholders.
        
         | kodah wrote:
         | I'm not really convinced GitHub scoring is realistic or even
         | really representative of much. Kubernetes has tons of stars,
         | yet how many stars do all the packages that Kubernetes consumes
         | have? The ingredients and the arrangement of the parts are
         | often more important than the whole; yet look who is rewarded.
         | 
         | HN scores, to me, stop mattering past about 500, maybe 1000. By
         | then you should know the guidelines, how to conduct some proper
         | discourse, and should have dropped baggage from previous
         | websites like Twitter or Reddit.
        
           | Taylor_OD wrote:
           | I like having more green boxes than not on github. But at
           | least 10% of my little green boxes are just commits little
           | nonsense commits I made for the sake of getting a green box.
           | 
           | Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one of
           | my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope. Will
           | a potential employer look and see a lot of green boxes and
           | think that makes me more qualified or passionate? You bet
           | your ass they will and have.
           | 
           | Is that good? I don't think so but I'll keep doing it as long
           | as it helps me get paid.
        
             | MaulingMonkey wrote:
             | > Is a potential employer ever going to look over every one
             | of my commits to see what percentage are meaningful? Nope.
             | 
             | What they'll do instead is look at a semi-random sampling
             | of your repositories and commits. They don't need to look
             | at every commit to get a statistically meaningful sampling
             | of what your commits look like, and they can look at even
             | less to get a vague, rough idea of what you're up to.
        
       | eivarv wrote:
       | "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
       | measure".
       | 
       | That's not to say anything about any beneficial side-effects,
       | though.
       | 
       | [0]:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law#Generalizatio...
        
       | aeturnum wrote:
       | The sociologist in me suspects that scoring systems are popular
       | because they instrumentalize interaction in a sufficiently
       | ambiguous way to do work for many audiences. It's really useful
       | that comment scores have vague relationships to a lot of socially
       | important qualities (interest / sentiment / etc). I 'use' changes
       | in my HN karma as a cue that someone is interacting with one of
       | my comments. For me the karma system could be totally replaced by
       | reply notifications - but others might use it differently.
       | 
       | Keeping the score system basic leaves each person to have
       | whatever thoughts they want about their karma without the website
       | telling them how to feel. There's a dark pattern aspect to this
       | where web sites can foster unhealthy levels of interaction while
       | saying that's not what they intended. There's also an emergent
       | behavior side where scoring systems are used in ways the makers
       | can't predict.
        
       | theamk wrote:
       | Those scores are a part of the game, but that doesn't mean they
       | are meaningless. They are just as meaningful as goals in soccer,
       | or stats in RPG, or gold coins in platformer games.
       | 
       | That means: realize this is a game, understand rules, and decide
       | if you want to play this game for the score. If not, don't waste
       | time of them. If yes, don't forget to periodically re-evaluate if
       | this game is still worth your time.
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-21 23:00 UTC)