LW tells people to upvote good comments and downvote bad comments. Where do I set the threshold of good/bad? Is it best for the community if I upvote only exceptionally good comments, or downvote only very bad comments, or downvote all comments that aren’t exceptionally good, or something else? Has this been studied? Is it possible to make a karma system where this question doesn’t arise?
Information theory says that you communicate the most if you send the three signals of up, down, nothing equally often. This would be a psychological disaster if everyone did it, but maybe you should.
It seems to me that the total voting ought to reflect the “net reward” we want to give the poster for their action of posting, like a trainer rewarding good behavior or punishing bad. For this reason, my voting usually takes into account the current total score. I think the community already abides by this for most negatively scored posts—they usually don’t sail much below −2. For posts that I feel I really benefited from, though, I don’t really follow my own policy per se. -- I just “pay back” what I got out of it to them.
Where do I set the threshold of good/bad?
I basically only downvote if there’s some line of argument that I object to in the post. I think I need to say what I’m objecting to specifically when I do this more often.
Is it best for the community if I upvote only exceptionally good comments, or downvote only very bad comments, or downvote all comments that aren’t exceptionally good, or something else?
My opinion is it has to depend on the current score of the post. [At least under the current system, which reports, if you will, net organic responses; in a different system where responses were from solicited peer-review requests, different behavior would be warranted.]
Has this been studied? Is it possible to make a karma system where this question doesn’t arise?
Good questions. I don’t know. There’s some further discussion here.
It seems to me that the total voting ought to reflect the “net reward” we want to give the poster for their action of posting,
This should be implemented in the system if done at all. Downvoting “nondeservingly” upvoted posts will make obvious but true comments look controversial. I think inconsistently meta-gaming the system just makes it less informative.
If you don’t think something deserves the upvotes, but isn’t wrong, then simply don’t vote.
ETA: I assume you didn’t mean that downvoting to balance the votes is good, but you didn’t mention it either.
Downvoting “nondeservingly” upvoted posts will make obvious but true comments look controversial.
Good point. I don’t actually do that, I do the “don’t vote” policy you mentioned, but I hadn’t thought about why, or even noticed that I do it correctly. Thanks. Your point that it would make the voting look controversial is well taken.
I would be tempted to upvote something that I thought had karma that was too low. This would tend to cause it to look “controversial” when, maybe, I agreed that it deserved a negative score. Is upvoting behavior also a bad idea in this case and I should just “not vote”?
This should be implemented in the system if done at all.
I don’t see how that’s possible without it having more information.
I don’t want to overthink this too much as I can’t help but think that these issues are artifacts of the voting system itself being a bit crude: e.g. should I be able to “vote” for a target karma score instead of just up or down? The score of the post could be the median target score.
I don’t know. I’m quite green here too. I don’t usually read heavily downvoted comments, as they’re hidden by default. Downvoted comments are less visible anyway, so any meta-gaming on them has less meaningful impact.
I might upvote a downvoted comment, if I don’t understand why it’s downvoted and wanted it to be more visible so that discussion would continue. It would be a good to follow up with a comment to clarify that, but many times I’m too lazy :(
I think making the system more complicated would just make people go even more meta.
I think that if we could coordinate perfectly what we mean by good comments, and each comment has a score between 0 and 1, then we should all upvote a comment with a positive score with a probability equal to its score, and downvote a comment with negative score with probability equal to its negative score.
This would cause the karma assigned to a post to drift over time unboundedly with expectation of: (the traffic that it recieves)*(the average score of voters), which seems problematic to me.
Nitpick: maybe you want the score to run between −1 and 1 and voting probability to be according to the absolute score? I’m confused by your phrase “comment with negative score”.
LW tells people to upvote good comments and downvote bad comments. Where do I set the threshold of good/bad? Is it best for the community if I upvote only exceptionally good comments, or downvote only very bad comments, or downvote all comments that aren’t exceptionally good, or something else? Has this been studied? Is it possible to make a karma system where this question doesn’t arise?
Information theory says that you communicate the most if you send the three signals of up, down, nothing equally often. This would be a psychological disaster if everyone did it, but maybe you should.
It seems to me that the total voting ought to reflect the “net reward” we want to give the poster for their action of posting, like a trainer rewarding good behavior or punishing bad. For this reason, my voting usually takes into account the current total score. I think the community already abides by this for most negatively scored posts—they usually don’t sail much below −2. For posts that I feel I really benefited from, though, I don’t really follow my own policy per se. -- I just “pay back” what I got out of it to them.
I basically only downvote if there’s some line of argument that I object to in the post. I think I need to say what I’m objecting to specifically when I do this more often.
My opinion is it has to depend on the current score of the post. [At least under the current system, which reports, if you will, net organic responses; in a different system where responses were from solicited peer-review requests, different behavior would be warranted.]
Good questions. I don’t know. There’s some further discussion here.
This should be implemented in the system if done at all. Downvoting “nondeservingly” upvoted posts will make obvious but true comments look controversial. I think inconsistently meta-gaming the system just makes it less informative.
If you don’t think something deserves the upvotes, but isn’t wrong, then simply don’t vote.
ETA: I assume you didn’t mean that downvoting to balance the votes is good, but you didn’t mention it either.
Good point. I don’t actually do that, I do the “don’t vote” policy you mentioned, but I hadn’t thought about why, or even noticed that I do it correctly. Thanks. Your point that it would make the voting look controversial is well taken.
I would be tempted to upvote something that I thought had karma that was too low. This would tend to cause it to look “controversial” when, maybe, I agreed that it deserved a negative score. Is upvoting behavior also a bad idea in this case and I should just “not vote”?
I don’t see how that’s possible without it having more information.
I don’t want to overthink this too much as I can’t help but think that these issues are artifacts of the voting system itself being a bit crude: e.g. should I be able to “vote” for a target karma score instead of just up or down? The score of the post could be the median target score.
I don’t know. I’m quite green here too. I don’t usually read heavily downvoted comments, as they’re hidden by default. Downvoted comments are less visible anyway, so any meta-gaming on them has less meaningful impact.
I might upvote a downvoted comment, if I don’t understand why it’s downvoted and wanted it to be more visible so that discussion would continue. It would be a good to follow up with a comment to clarify that, but many times I’m too lazy :(
I think making the system more complicated would just make people go even more meta.
I think that if we could coordinate perfectly what we mean by good comments, and each comment has a score between 0 and 1, then we should all upvote a comment with a positive score with a probability equal to its score, and downvote a comment with negative score with probability equal to its negative score.
This would cause the karma assigned to a post to drift over time unboundedly with expectation of: (the traffic that it recieves)*(the average score of voters), which seems problematic to me.
Nitpick: maybe you want the score to run between −1 and 1 and voting probability to be according to the absolute score? I’m confused by your phrase “comment with negative score”.
“negative score” means the negative of the score you give. If you give −1/2, you downvote with probability 1⁄2.
If we could coordinate perfectly, we’d delegate all the voting to one person. Can you try solving the problem with weaker assumptions?