I don’t think that the karma system is about how much low or high a comment deserves to be. It is about whether you like it or dislike it. So you upvote it or you downvote it, regardless how high or low it already is. Of course, you can be neutral as well and then you don’t vote. Again, regardless where it currently is.
But it seems that many people are just policing around, judging is there already enough up or down votes for a post and mending the situation.
This is wrongly understood karma system. Downvoting you.
You may well be right about what the LW karma system is about.
My $0.02 on a related subject follow, though.
A reputation system provides me with value insofar as it gives me feedback about how valuable various pieces of content are judged by people whose opinions I value.
LW-karma’s biggest weakness in this area (which it shares with every other reputation system I’ve ever seen used anywhere) is that it doesn’t distinguish between the judgments of people whose opinions I value, those whose opinions I anti-value, and those whose opinions don’t matter to me at all.
Ignoring that for the moment (in effect, pretending I value everyone’s opinion equally), a system modeled on “ignore the current value, upvote or downvote based on whether I like it or not” means that when comparing comment A with a score of N to comment B with a score of N/2, all that tells me is that twice as many people who read the comment net-liked A than B. This might be because twice as many people read A, and the comments were approximately equally likable. It might be because 20 times as many people read A and A was far less likable. It might be because 20 times as many people read B and A was far more likable.
In other words, a karma system modeled that way means I can’t really tell based on the karma scores of a comment to what degree people found the comment likable. Since that’s exactly what I want to know, a karma system modeled that way is relatively useless to me, unless I can assume that roughly the same number of people read A and B. On LW, I don’t consider that assumption warranted, so to the extent that you are correctly describing the LW karma system, that system is relatively useless to me.
By contrast, a karma system modeled on “if I like it more than its current rating, upvote it, if I like it less than its current rating, downvote it,” doesn’t have that defect. It would, of course, have the defect that late voters count more than early voters for most comments, which creates incentives for vote-withholding and generally makes it hard to extract the information I want from vote totals. I am to a large extent prepared to ignore that failing, as it strikes me as falling into the wireheading category, and trying to stop a system that’s able and inclined to wirehead from choosing to do so is like trying to push back the tides.
So on balance, I think that RobertLumley’s model is more useful than yours.
Again, I’m not arguing that he’s right about which model is actually in use on LW. I suspect that in practice it’s neither; the actual system is far messier and more embarrassing to articulate, and in practice karma scores don’t provide much useful information except in very extreme cases.
Mostly, karma scores are a mechanism for silencing people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked so they stop pestering everyone else. Which is fine, and I don’t object to that, but let’s not make more of it than it is.
I can mostly agree with what you saying here. What I dislike a bit, is playing two different games simultaneously. One is the debating, what a like a lot, the other is karma shooting what I still find funny but a little annoying in the midst of the first.
For the first is important and the second does
silencing people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked so they stop pestering everyone else
But do I really want to read only what I already know or agree with?
But do I really want to read only what I already know or agree with?
Beats me. Why do you ask?
It kind of sounds like you’re trying to equate “people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked” with “people who only write stuff I already know or agree with”… in which case I would ask you to defend that equation, since it seems pretty unjustified to me.
you’re trying to equate “people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked” with “people who only write stuff I already know or agree with”
I suspect somebody of this crowd might write something very interesting to me, had he not been such a karma whore. I would gladly pay that with some more digesting of empty and silly posts, which are inevitably when there is no karma system.
I expect that the more empty and silly posts there are, the less likely the members of “this crowd” who have something interesting to say will be to continue posting here.
For what it’s worth, I have changed the way I operate significantly since I joined LW. If you read the link, I originally operated by one, but now almost exclusively aim for two, primarily for the reasons TheOtherDave points out—karma is largely meaningless if you operate by one, because it doesn’t tell you proportion of readers who voted.
I don’t think that the karma system is about how much low or high a comment deserves to be. It is about whether you like it or dislike it. So you upvote it or you downvote it, regardless how high or low it already is. Of course, you can be neutral as well and then you don’t vote. Again, regardless where it currently is.
But it seems that many people are just policing around, judging is there already enough up or down votes for a post and mending the situation.
This is wrongly understood karma system. Downvoting you.
You may well be right about what the LW karma system is about.
My $0.02 on a related subject follow, though.
A reputation system provides me with value insofar as it gives me feedback about how valuable various pieces of content are judged by people whose opinions I value.
LW-karma’s biggest weakness in this area (which it shares with every other reputation system I’ve ever seen used anywhere) is that it doesn’t distinguish between the judgments of people whose opinions I value, those whose opinions I anti-value, and those whose opinions don’t matter to me at all.
Ignoring that for the moment (in effect, pretending I value everyone’s opinion equally), a system modeled on “ignore the current value, upvote or downvote based on whether I like it or not” means that when comparing comment A with a score of N to comment B with a score of N/2, all that tells me is that twice as many people who read the comment net-liked A than B. This might be because twice as many people read A, and the comments were approximately equally likable. It might be because 20 times as many people read A and A was far less likable. It might be because 20 times as many people read B and A was far more likable.
In other words, a karma system modeled that way means I can’t really tell based on the karma scores of a comment to what degree people found the comment likable. Since that’s exactly what I want to know, a karma system modeled that way is relatively useless to me, unless I can assume that roughly the same number of people read A and B. On LW, I don’t consider that assumption warranted, so to the extent that you are correctly describing the LW karma system, that system is relatively useless to me.
By contrast, a karma system modeled on “if I like it more than its current rating, upvote it, if I like it less than its current rating, downvote it,” doesn’t have that defect. It would, of course, have the defect that late voters count more than early voters for most comments, which creates incentives for vote-withholding and generally makes it hard to extract the information I want from vote totals. I am to a large extent prepared to ignore that failing, as it strikes me as falling into the wireheading category, and trying to stop a system that’s able and inclined to wirehead from choosing to do so is like trying to push back the tides.
So on balance, I think that RobertLumley’s model is more useful than yours.
Again, I’m not arguing that he’s right about which model is actually in use on LW. I suspect that in practice it’s neither; the actual system is far messier and more embarrassing to articulate, and in practice karma scores don’t provide much useful information except in very extreme cases.
Mostly, karma scores are a mechanism for silencing people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked so they stop pestering everyone else. Which is fine, and I don’t object to that, but let’s not make more of it than it is.
I can mostly agree with what you saying here. What I dislike a bit, is playing two different games simultaneously. One is the debating, what a like a lot, the other is karma shooting what I still find funny but a little annoying in the midst of the first.
For the first is important and the second does
But do I really want to read only what I already know or agree with?
Beats me. Why do you ask?
It kind of sounds like you’re trying to equate “people whose contributions are sufficiently widely disliked” with “people who only write stuff I already know or agree with”… in which case I would ask you to defend that equation, since it seems pretty unjustified to me.
Never mind, it was a rhetorical question.
I suspect somebody of this crowd might write something very interesting to me, had he not been such a karma whore. I would gladly pay that with some more digesting of empty and silly posts, which are inevitably when there is no karma system.
I expect that the more empty and silly posts there are, the less likely the members of “this crowd” who have something interesting to say will be to continue posting here.
Related
For what it’s worth, I have changed the way I operate significantly since I joined LW. If you read the link, I originally operated by one, but now almost exclusively aim for two, primarily for the reasons TheOtherDave points out—karma is largely meaningless if you operate by one, because it doesn’t tell you proportion of readers who voted.