My comments (depending on my mood) will often include "Snark" while still making a point. I suspect I'm going to get down-voted much more often if the community decides that down-votes are the way to enforce this. I don't mind being down-voted occasionally but I'd rather not be hell-banned - I think I still contribute to the community overall.
I (previously) used the average karma/contribution on my profile page to self-police by trying to maintain an average around at least 3. Any idea why it was removed? Will it be coming back in some form? Any ideas on other ways to make sure I'm staying positive on here?
If worried, you can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com to get a reading on what's going on (not that we always know). But really, don't worry about it. Of course you're a positive contributor. Truly negative contributors, by the way, never worry about this.
We got rid of average because (a) after looking extensively at the data we didn't see any value in it, (b) we had evidence of people gaming the metric, (c) its implementation was complicated, and most importantly (d) we think upvotes are wrong thing to optimize for. Optimize for saying substantive things.
I (previously) used the average karma/contribution on my profile page to self-police by trying to maintain an average around at least 3. Any idea why it was removed? Will it be coming back in some form? Any ideas on other ways to make sure I'm staying positive on here?