I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.
I think this would train the wrong habits in LessWrong users, and also skew the incentive landscape that is already tilted somewhat too much in the direction of “you get karma if you post content” away from “you get karma if your content on average makes the site better”.
hmm, I both see the incentive issue and also that the current widespread downvote marginally mitigates this. Not sure if it helps a lot to have lurker downvotes, and expect there are notable costs. Do you think there is a karma bar below which the EV of a downvote from those users is negative? My guess is at least totally new users add painful noise in a net negative way often enough that their contribution to keeping things bad things low is not worthwhile, and pushes away some good contributors lowering average quality.
I suspect you might be underestimating the how much some users take a psychological hit if they put effort into something and get slapped down without comment, having those be somewhat reliably not misfiring seems important.
(this is probably fairly minor on your list of things, no worries if you disengage)
I think it’s a hard tradeoff. I do think lots of people take psychological hits, but it is also genuinely important that people who are not a good fit for the site learn quickly and get the hint that they either have to shape up or get out. Otherwise we are at risk of quickly deteroriating in discussion quality. I do think this still makes it valuable to reduce variance, but I think we’ve already largely done that with the strong-vote and vote-weighting system.
Upvotes by senior users matter a lot more, and any senior user can you dig you out of multiple junior users downvoting you, which helps.