Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don’t personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person’s recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
Should we also have a rule saying,
“Please avoid upvoting recommendations just because you personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific virtue in a person’s recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.”
I don’t think people should be punished for posting unpopular or bad material, but why not let people be upvoted for either popular or obscure but good material? Then the karma points remain useful (and you can infer from your own recognition or failure of recognition whether they are indicating popularity or quality-despite-obscurity) but people don’t feel afraid or threatened to post other stuff.
If the goal is that people should not be punished, how about the rule “do not downvote into negative score”. That way it can never cost karma to post here, but people can still adjust the score of a recommendation downwards. If only positive votes are allowed, the scores will over-value controversial recommendations.
If a high-scoring, highly controversial recommendation gets in such a situation, it means it got enough attention to be controversial and reached quite a few people, and is giving us some nice data on who likes what and how the LW population stands on this, assuming there’s some kind of written feedback. I think that data is probably worth the karmic difference.
So to maximise karma I should just post links to every piece of media ever produced? People should be disincentivised from posting stuff that will harm the signal-noise ratio, here as in other threads.
Let’s use common sense. If I feel you deliberately post crap suggestions I’ll downvote you, not because they’re crap but because you deliberately harmed the signal-noise ratio.
I don’t think that would work if you tried (posting links to everything). It may naively seem like that is being incentivized but from my own intuitions about what I would do if someone did that and that fact that that hasn’t actually happened, I don’t think you need to be concerned.
I agree with both your points. I disagree with the premise that people should be encouraged to maximize karma, or that this will be a significant problem, or that karma votes will be given primarily on the basis of how much users enjoyed the recommended content.
I didn’t realize that I was suggesting ‘posting links to every piece of media ever produced’. Maybe we should be discussing an addition to the rules about that since apparently it’s a problem.
Meta Thread
Should we also have a rule saying,
“Please avoid upvoting recommendations just because you personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific virtue in a person’s recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.”
?
I don’t think people should be punished for posting unpopular or bad material, but why not let people be upvoted for either popular or obscure but good material? Then the karma points remain useful (and you can infer from your own recognition or failure of recognition whether they are indicating popularity or quality-despite-obscurity) but people don’t feel afraid or threatened to post other stuff.
If the goal is that people should not be punished, how about the rule “do not downvote into negative score”. That way it can never cost karma to post here, but people can still adjust the score of a recommendation downwards. If only positive votes are allowed, the scores will over-value controversial recommendations.
I think this almost cancels out.
If a high-scoring, highly controversial recommendation gets in such a situation, it means it got enough attention to be controversial and reached quite a few people, and is giving us some nice data on who likes what and how the LW population stands on this, assuming there’s some kind of written feedback. I think that data is probably worth the karmic difference.
So to maximise karma I should just post links to every piece of media ever produced? People should be disincentivised from posting stuff that will harm the signal-noise ratio, here as in other threads.
Let’s use common sense. If I feel you deliberately post crap suggestions I’ll downvote you, not because they’re crap but because you deliberately harmed the signal-noise ratio.
I don’t think that would work if you tried (posting links to everything). It may naively seem like that is being incentivized but from my own intuitions about what I would do if someone did that and that fact that that hasn’t actually happened, I don’t think you need to be concerned.
I agree with both your points. I disagree with the premise that people should be encouraged to maximize karma, or that this will be a significant problem, or that karma votes will be given primarily on the basis of how much users enjoyed the recommended content.
I didn’t realize that I was suggesting ‘posting links to every piece of media ever produced’. Maybe we should be discussing an addition to the rules about that since apparently it’s a problem.
I don’t think he was talking about you, just speaking hypothetically.