I worked out a while ago that the comments I expended least effort on were the ones that were most likely to get significantly upvoted (and also downvoted) - longer comments get way fewer votes. My theory is that a single, almost throwaway sentence is easier to agree (or disagree) with, and hence earn a reflexive vote-click. When I write a few paragraphs (or more) as a comment, particularly with researched links and/or data, and thoughts/commentary on those links/data, I get way fewer votes, either up or down.
My initial reaction to this "discovery" was to decide to post shorter and more concise comments. But a few moments of reflection revealed that for me that's a pointless change of behavior for two reasons: 1) I don't comment with the aim of getting voted up, and shouldn't change my comment behavior just because there's a metric to be gamed, and 2) because at least for me, the bulk of my karma has come way more from fortuitously being first to submit a popular link (mostly assisted by my non West Coast GMT+10:00 timezone) - since the karma to be gained from a several hundred upvoted submission is _way_ less effort than writing thoughtful comments - and it's clear people are gaming that to pump karma (who was it that posted a while back about seeing bots stalking their rss feeds to autosubmit new posts? patio11 maybe?)
As you can see, I'm rambling all over the place with this comment - almost certainly in a way that makes it more difficult for readers to chose whether to up or down vote, and I'll guess resulting in neither.
Possibly stupid idea floating around my head right now - what if the voting system allowed you to not just up or down vote a comment, but to selectively up or down vote paragraphs or sentences or sentence fragments? Maybe I could choose to upvote your "the article author's claim that the function mapping real pixels to CSS pixels is nonlinear (which I think is just a misreading of what the spec intended.)" and possibly downvote another bit (there's not actually any of your post I'd choose to downvote, but maybe for example the "I suspect I know why I was downvoted"), then choose how to split my 1 unit of vote between the bits I want to vote up and the ones I want to vote down, so I could say 2/3rds for the up vote and 1/3rd for the down vote giving you a total of +1/3rd of a unit of karma - and more importantly, giving you feedback on why you're seeing the voting numbers you are…
I worked out a while ago that the comments I expended least effort on were the ones that were most likely to get significantly upvoted (and also downvoted) - longer comments get way fewer votes. My theory is that a single, almost throwaway sentence is easier to agree (or disagree) with, and hence earn a reflexive vote-click. When I write a few paragraphs (or more) as a comment, particularly with researched links and/or data, and thoughts/commentary on those links/data, I get way fewer votes, either up or down.
My initial reaction to this "discovery" was to decide to post shorter and more concise comments. But a few moments of reflection revealed that for me that's a pointless change of behavior for two reasons: 1) I don't comment with the aim of getting voted up, and shouldn't change my comment behavior just because there's a metric to be gamed, and 2) because at least for me, the bulk of my karma has come way more from fortuitously being first to submit a popular link (mostly assisted by my non West Coast GMT+10:00 timezone) - since the karma to be gained from a several hundred upvoted submission is _way_ less effort than writing thoughtful comments - and it's clear people are gaming that to pump karma (who was it that posted a while back about seeing bots stalking their rss feeds to autosubmit new posts? patio11 maybe?)
As you can see, I'm rambling all over the place with this comment - almost certainly in a way that makes it more difficult for readers to chose whether to up or down vote, and I'll guess resulting in neither.
Possibly stupid idea floating around my head right now - what if the voting system allowed you to not just up or down vote a comment, but to selectively up or down vote paragraphs or sentences or sentence fragments? Maybe I could choose to upvote your "the article author's claim that the function mapping real pixels to CSS pixels is nonlinear (which I think is just a misreading of what the spec intended.)" and possibly downvote another bit (there's not actually any of your post I'd choose to downvote, but maybe for example the "I suspect I know why I was downvoted"), then choose how to split my 1 unit of vote between the bits I want to vote up and the ones I want to vote down, so I could say 2/3rds for the up vote and 1/3rd for the down vote giving you a total of +1/3rd of a unit of karma - and more importantly, giving you feedback on why you're seeing the voting numbers you are…