jacksonj04 Comments, Karma and You blog

In recent days I've seen a few people around the site having a moan about their comments being buried due to downvoting. In some cases this has been a justified moaning, but in the vast majority it seems to be a case of people throwing a wobbler because their comment was - for want of a better word suitable for a family audience - rubbish, and the community picked up on this.

I'll start by addressing the concerns of those who had justifiable moaning. We know the Karma system for comment promotion/burying isn't quite perfect, and it is undergoing tuning on our development version of the site (We had all kinds of weird numbers coming out of it when Scott broke some of the maths). When it's working properly, people who persistently vote against the grain, or only vote down will have their 'weight' reduced accordingly, whereas the more useful voters will become worth more. At the moment the only thing stopping these idiots are the community, who seem to respond well to people saying their comment has been unfairly squashed and restoring it to a sensible place. This will also be taken into account in the final Karma system, working as a second check against rogue down-voters whereby people whose votes are persistently undone will lose weight.

As a final word of advice however, remember that until we implement this system in the public site your Karma scores are nothing more than the product of a bit of maths and have no affect on your rights around the site, your social status, or your needs to buy enhancements from those spam emails you keep getting. And yes, when we do implement it we will probably retroactively re-process the entirety of Karma issued so far to get it working right.

To the people who just post bad comments and then complain when they're buried. The system in these cases is working exactly as it's designed and although you may think your comment was amazing everybody else didn't. If you find your comments being constantly buried then I recommend taking a look at other highly voted comments and looking for differences between them and your own. People generally don't vote opinions down (We do check these things) unless they're wrapped in an overall bad comment. Look at things like length, spelling, your use of English, and how useful the comment is. "I agree" isn't going to win any points.

Finally, I'd like to thank everybody (You know who you are) who has helped us in our fine-tuning by reporting silly scores or obvious malicious voting. There are hundreds of comments around the site daily and we can't keep tabs on all the activity but with you pointing out places it's gone wrong it's much easier for us to get our algorithms absolutely right. As usual we're still looking for instances of bad scoring, so if you spot any please give me a PM.