Honestly, your karma doesn't have much impact inside of HN either. It's just a number that lets you know you are a reasonable fit with the community.

That's more accurate than you know. A down voted comment doesn't mean it's a bad comment. Simply that it doesn't adhere to what the community deems as right. This defeats the purpose of shading out the comments. Since the quality of a comment can't be determined by it's color, you have to read it yourself.

Karma has evolved to merely mean: I don't post unpopular opinions.

This is merely anecdotal, of course, and should go without saying (but needs to be said here). I see this happening with other people's comments far more often. It's a shame that while we removed karma from posts, we still display and indicator of the groupthink to the world.

In the end, a comment should either be displayed, or flagged and removed.

I hope your bank account isn't stored as just an int(!)

But seriously, it is a representation of something physical. Money. Money which can in turn be used for other physical things. Reputation "karma" isn't. It /is/ meaningless in this context, because you can never log into HN again and your life will go on.

I don't think the argument was "anything digital is pointless."

I read the argument precisely as "anything digital is pointless"

"One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters. None of it. It's a big joke. My twitters and my wikis and my posts don't mean anything. They're bits in the stream."

I Really don't see any other way to interpret that. The "bits in the stream" are having an increasingly large amount of impact on the world outside the internet every day, and to pretend otherwise is irresponsible.

I think the implicit assumption is that he was referring to the more social aspects of the internet (forums, blogs, etc.).

Only difference between money and karma is that we can't easily trade karma. Modern money is not physical, it is just a figment of our imaginations. It has only the value we collectively give it.

i wonder how well a site would run if users had to give up karma to upvote a comment or submission.

So, in other words, it's really important? Like, pays our bills, heats our homes, puts food on the table? If you want to apply reductionist arguments, then ancient money is just piles of metal. Not like it had any "value" beyond what they collectively gave it, either.

Do we have to revisit the barter system where value is traded for value to once again realize the reason money was invented? Fish for tools works, until you want apples.

It doesn't matter whether something "intrinsically" has value (wood as fuel, apple as food) if you can trade it for something that does. As long as that remains true, karma remains an int and bank accounts remain buying power. Fin.

Whether it puts food on the table or not doesn't matter. People spend their time here, when they could be doing other things (or earning more money to put more food on the table). Ultimately karma has a certain value to some people, whether or not it does to you. Just as I might not understand why some people will pay 10s of thousands of dollars more for a car that, ultimately, does the same thing as another car. "intangible" does not mean "valueless"

Anyway, for karma to be effective, all it has to do is have enough value to outweigh the (equally intangible) value of the satisfaction of posting something trollish.

But money is just an abstract idea that we exchange for those other physical things. It isn't really a representation of anything physical anymore.

It's not like a bank keeps a physical amount of cash equal to all account holders' deposits (if they did, they'd have nothing to lend). Instead all you do with your money is transfer it, or get paper vouchers for it in forms like checks, money orders, or federal reserve notes......

That people accept those for things that are physical doesn't change the fact that the money is in fact not a representation of anything physical.