The problem is not as urgent as you might think, though. In a site that's growing, you get a de facto karma decay, because a top submission gets more points than it would have 6 months ago.

I think people think that pg will look at your YC application differently if you have a high karma on the site. I have no idea if that's true (never applied) but some people have said that they had high karma and didn't get accepted. So YMMV.

I'd worry more about my app, idea, biz plan than to worry about karma when applying. I doubt pg will accept you just because you contribute to n.yc.

this post had nothing to do with getting into YC funding, the funding cycle reset idea was simply a suggestion of adequate time to reset.

for the record, i am not applying to YC next cycle or any other cycle. just wanted to help the site.

Just to add a different voice to the matter, I don't subscribe by this philosophy. I don't care about my karma points and its existence doesn't affect my motivation to participate. I upvote in appreciation, and post to share. It's the crowd, and the crowd's ideas, that matter. I don't use the leaderboard at all, and in that sense, it is "utterly meaningless" to me whether it disappears or not.

Everyday everyone's karma gets multiplied by n where 0<n<1. (0.9 seems good)

We will soon takeover the world! ! !! ! muahahahahaha

I'd also like to see a weighted score something like (karma from posts) / (1+log10(total number of words in posts)).

maybe the total accumulated points of all time are also kept. YC doesn't erase any data. its just writing a new database query.

old query: Points = "select count(votes) where user.id = 123"

new method: "select votes, date where user.id = 123" and do some heuristic magic in the model or results datastructure.

Kierkegaard did his studies more than 150 years ago, maybe it's time to use his findings in our life.

He discovered numerous aspects of crowd thinking, one is that they are generally less smart than individuals. Groups of people tends to act in the same way (conformation).

That's why the voting thing on websites doesn't work: leaders becomes unchallengeable.

(I'm not arguing against democracy, where lists are closed before each election, election are a discreet events etc.)

Moreover, what is the aim of collecting votes on this websites? If people vote or bury one of my comments, what does it means about my future or past comments? It is only a conformity problem.

I don't think voting in its current form is good. I am much more fond of a prediction market-esque, or virtual economy (the specific term eludes me at the moment) implementation. Nevertheless, here is a possible way to answer your question about the aim.

A hypothetical case would be, users upvote in appreciation (or to bookmark), with the side effect that more appreciated items float higher, and receive greater visibility, acting as a filter. The catch is that it's to the benefit of other users.

To that, I'm not entirely sure why it works (as in, why it became popular). I don't click arrows much. I clicked yours because I appreciate your reply, 3 days after :-)

Which shows another glaring problem. Current voting mechanisms let these votes go stale. I'm upvoting on something 7+ days old. You will receive a point but not know the context of it. Anyhow, that's another topic.

Thanks again, for following up. Don't agree entirely, but a good point nonetheless.