Coventry's Journal: Did you Know?

An interesting thing I just found in the karma FAQs:

Positive moderation of type 'funny' does not help your karma,

But,

Negative moderation, even when against a highly rated joke, Does affect your karma.

So, jokes only have the potential to _lower_ your karma.

Anyone else find this rather odd?

Thus, you could get to a 5 on a joke, and then one person moderates down to a 4 for whatever reason, and your karma is now worse than if you had never posted the joke...

Ok, so, assuming I agree with the idea that 'funny' gets no karma (which I kind of understand, but still don't fully agree with - 1/3rd karma, or 1/2 karma maybe, but not none):
I would think that any negative moderation on a post marked 'funny' should first cancel out the moderation points used to mark up the post, maybe in a two to one ratio, before it affects the user's karma. Thus, a comment with a rating of funny rating of 5, with a starting score of 1 due to being a registered user, should need 3 negative moderations to remove 1 karma from the user. I don't think the score should be affected in this 2-1 manner, only the karma calculation, so the resultant score of a +4:funny and -3:overated/troll would still be the +1, resulting in a two in this case.

So, karma affect from funny posts should be something like this:
(pseudo code, mind you)
if humor_moderation > 0 and humor_moderation > negative_moderation:
    karma_delta = min(0 , humor_moderation - .5 * (negative_moderation))

Note the checks for if the humor_moderation is positive, and ensuring that the humor mod is larger than the negative mods - thus a -2:troll +1:funny would work as it does today.

What do you think?

Personally not a fan of Karma

[huckda]

But I Do love all jokes.. good and bad =)

I read Slashdot mainly for insight and often glance past egads of garbage/rants/flames/trolls to try and learn a little something here and there. Mostly I find the interesting stuff in journals, as 80-90% of the headlined /. stories pertain to nothing of interest to me.