I thought about the idea of removing the effect of karma votes on personal blogs in the future and I don’t think it’s a good idea.
I do understand the lure of wanting to be inclusive of any kind of writing and also allow those people who’s posts currently get downvoted into oblivion but if a lot of personal blogs are of that quality less people would read personal blogs of people they didn’t subscribe to. This inturn will mean that if a new person writes a personal blog post, nobody will read it.
Longer-term I think it’s better to make the software easy to install by other people so that the people who do want to have a LessWrong2.0 style blog about cat pictures can install their own instances.
My understanding is that Cat Pictures aren’t much related to the “upvotes/downvotes don’t count for Personal Blogs” thing, and if Quality is a consideration it’s only a secondary one. There’s a few common use cases we expect to be relevant to Personal Blogs, such as:
discussing politics with rational people (we don’t want this on the front page but it’s okay for the blogs, in places that get a bit less visibility)
making calls to action, especially relating to rationality community culture
talking about less fleshed out ideas in a low key setting.
All of these are things that intersect a bit weirdly with karma. Politics and calls to action incentivize people to upvote or downvote based on tribal or coalitional affiliation, which isn’t necessarily about epistemic clarity.
The problem of “not enough people will read the personal blogs to start getting them upvoted” is definitely an issue (I’m not sure how to solve it), but it’s going to need to get solved in some scalable fashion, and I think trying to disincentivize people from starting personal blogs isn’t the best tradeoff to make to solve it.
I thought about the idea of removing the effect of karma votes on personal blogs in the future and I don’t think it’s a good idea.
I do understand the lure of wanting to be inclusive of any kind of writing and also allow those people who’s posts currently get downvoted into oblivion but if a lot of personal blogs are of that quality less people would read personal blogs of people they didn’t subscribe to. This inturn will mean that if a new person writes a personal blog post, nobody will read it.
Longer-term I think it’s better to make the software easy to install by other people so that the people who do want to have a LessWrong2.0 style blog about cat pictures can install their own instances.
My understanding is that Cat Pictures aren’t much related to the “upvotes/downvotes don’t count for Personal Blogs” thing, and if Quality is a consideration it’s only a secondary one. There’s a few common use cases we expect to be relevant to Personal Blogs, such as:
discussing politics with rational people (we don’t want this on the front page but it’s okay for the blogs, in places that get a bit less visibility)
making calls to action, especially relating to rationality community culture
talking about less fleshed out ideas in a low key setting.
All of these are things that intersect a bit weirdly with karma. Politics and calls to action incentivize people to upvote or downvote based on tribal or coalitional affiliation, which isn’t necessarily about epistemic clarity.
The problem of “not enough people will read the personal blogs to start getting them upvoted” is definitely an issue (I’m not sure how to solve it), but it’s going to need to get solved in some scalable fashion, and I think trying to disincentivize people from starting personal blogs isn’t the best tradeoff to make to solve it.