Something I'd like to do is write up an article on what it takes to emulate an Apple 2. Getting the disk to work was surprisingly complicated--the Apple does all the low level track formatting in software which means the emulator has to take the logical disk image and generate a bitstream that the emulated software expects so it can turn it back into logical bytes in memory. That required getting a lot of details right about the bit format, rotation speed of the disk, etc.
The whole upvoting/downvoting concept seems to be aimed at recreating communities where the majority can shout down any minorities. At the village level. A fear tactic aimed at making you subconsciously consider whether what you say will please the majority.
Ironic that it's called "karma", which is a complete perversion of the original religious meaning of the concept, perverted into a means of recording a "permanent record" of how antisocial or unsubmissive you've been to community opprobrium. Purely regressive adaptation of technology, and a crime against the spirit of those who created it.
It would be interesting if, say, when you upvoted something then your perception of upvotes and downvotes from people who similarly upvoted that thing were subtly changed and so forth. In essence, by upvoting something you would be changing your perception of the universe.
Which, I guess, is kind of how Google works in the long run, and also would tend to self-select people into like-minded groups. Overall, I think that our options are somewhat limited -- we either end up in a self-selected community or in a self-selected sub-community. E.g. I was "repelled" by digg because any politically "liberal" comment I made would be downvoted to oblivion within minutes. While similar things would happen on reddit if, say, one said things critical of libertarianism, I didn't find this quite so frustrating, and simply learned to curb my views accordingly.
Here on Hackernews (which I find to be the most reasonable community since the glory days of slashdot) I have learned to accept that, say, being critical of Android or having anything nice to say about PHP is likely to lead to a lot of welts.
I haven't seen any site do anything more creative then up/down. Maybe crowd-sourcing the ranking of content is a dead end road. I wonder what a better solution could be.
I have a feeling the first site to dramatically improve content ranking is going to explode.
Basically, it's pointless to get upset at a number that goes up or down when someone you will never know presses an arrow that goes up or down. Treat it like a natural random process rather than an intentionally malevolent one.
I wouldn't worry about karma points on HN. Karma isn't meant to happen as a result of the votes of others, but instead on cosmic feedback, synchronizing with our activities and perceptions.
According to those who subscribe, anyway. But whether you believe or not, karma is not decided by a committee of down-voting equipped readers, each with his/her own desire for points. That's not karma, that's polling or rating.
