Since Karma Changes was posted, there have been 20 top level posts. With one exception, all of those posts are presently at positive karma. EDIT: I was using the list on the wiki, which is not up to date. Incorporating the posts between the last one on that list and now, there is a total of 76 posts between Karma Changes and today. This one is the only new data point on negatively rated posts, so it’s 2 of 76.
I looked at the 40 posts just prior to Karma Changes, and of the forty, sixofthemarestillnegative. It looks like before the change, many times more posts were voted into the red. I have observed that a number of recent posts were in fact downvoted, sometimes a fair amount, but crept back up over time.
Hypothesis: the changes included removing the display minimum of 0 for top-level posts. Now that people can see that something has been voted negative, instead of just being at 0 (which could be the result of indifference), sympathy kicks in and people provide upvotes.
Is this a behavior we want? If not, what can we do about it?
One of the expected effects of the karma change is to make people more cautious about what they put in a top level post. Perhaps this is only evidence of that effect.
No. It is not difficult to create a top level post that is approved of or at least kept at ‘0’. I want undesirable top level posts to hurt.
If not, what can we do about it?
Replace all ‘-ve’ karma value displays of top level posts with ‘- points’ or ‘<0 points’. We don’t necessarily need to know just how disapproved of a particular post is.
I’ve called before for median-based karma: you set a score you think a post should have and the median is used for display purposes, with “fake votes” reducing the influence of individual votes until there are enough to gain a true picture.
That doesn’t really avoid the issues in Arrow’s Theorem, merely blunts them, assuring us that we shouldn’t actually care about IIA. However, the fact that this karma scale is one-dimensional combined with the assumption that people have a singly-peaked preference function does show that this is one of those cases where Arrow’s Theorem doesn’t apply. Median is a good choice because it’s not terribly gamable.
Actually, the point of the linked article was that irrelevant alternatives aren’t. Rather, they reveal information about relative strengths of preferences IF, as Arrow’s Theorem’s assumes, you are restricted to voting methods involving ordinal ranking of the options.
Therefore, you can avoid the claimed problems by being able to express the magnitude of your preference, not just its ranking against others, which is the idea proposed here.
It could be sympathy, or a judgment that the poster shouldn’t be excessively discouraged from posting in the future.
Is this a behavior we want?
Sure, why not? We can always change things later if we start getting overrun by bad posts, and people still aren’t willing to vote them down into negative territory.
There is a limited downvote budget for each voter (in some ratio to the voter’s budget). Downvoting a post now uses 10 points from that budget rather than 1, so perhaps low-karma downvoters (or downvoters who have exhausted their downvote budgets) are now having less of an impact.
I like seeing the negative number on my posts. But I have also noticed a voting trend that seems to be much more forgiving than the posts of old.
The first wave of readers seem to vote up; the second wave votes down; over time it stabilizes somewhere near where the first wave peaked. This doesn’t seem to happen on posts that are really superb.
I think showing the full number of up and down votes would be helpful to authors and also let people know why a post is at the number it is. Seeing +5 −7 is different than seeing −2.
That being said, karma inflation seems to be hitting. I am rarely getting downvoted on comments anymore. I don’t think I have improved that much as a commentator. I am not convinced that the effects you are seeing are only happening to Posts.
Is this a behavior we want? If not, what can we do about it?
I think a great way to handle the Post karma is to hide the actual number for a week. Let it show + or—for positive or negative but no numbers. By the time one week has passed most people will have moved on.
Another solution may be to keep actual voting history available and let people see votes by people who said their history is public. As far as I can tell, that preference doesn’t do anything yet.
ETA: Another solution would be to set karma rewards to only happen after a certain threshold. Between 0 and +5 you don’t get any karma. After that, you get 10 karma per point. Everything under 0 still penalizes you 10 karma per point.
Or the above but only getting rewards after a certain percentage votes up. +5 −1 nets 40 karma, +20 −16 nets nothing, but each have a score of +4.
Voting history publication does do something—click on a user’s name, and then click “liked” or “disliked”, and you can see what top-level posts they have voted up or down. It just doesn’t work backwards, and doesn’t work for comments.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
If for example the cost was ten times the 25th percentile of post scores, you know you’ll lose Karma if your post is in the bottom quarter of less wrong posts.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
Each upvote is worth 10 karma, each downvote is worth −15? Borderline and controversial posts would get hit hard by this.
Anything this complicated, though, owes it to the author to see both numbers.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
If for example the cost was ten times the 25th percentile, you know you’ll lose Karma if your post is in the bottom quarter of less wrong posts.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it sympathy. Sometimes I will up- (or down-) vote something if I think it is better (or worse) than its current score suggests. The purpose of karma on articles should be to identify those most worth reading to those who haven’t yet read them, not to be a popularity contest where everyone who disliked it votes it down forever.
I also tend to vote posts up or down based on what I think the score ought to be. But it seems clear that sympathy plays a part. Liked posts spiral freely off towards infinity but disliked posts don’t ever spiral down in a similar way. This gives a distinct bias to the expected payoff of posting borderline posts and so is probably not desirable.
Sympathy upvotes are already games more complicated than “liked/disliked”.
It’s not a desirable solution. It’s just the best literal answer an individual can have to the “what can we do about it?” question that does not rely on political advocacy. It’s true whether or not people hate it.
Since Karma Changes was posted, there have been 20 top level posts. With one exception, all of those posts are presently at positive karma. EDIT: I was using the list on the wiki, which is not up to date. Incorporating the posts between the last one on that list and now, there is a total of 76 posts between Karma Changes and today. This one is the only new data point on negatively rated posts, so it’s 2 of 76.
I looked at the 40 posts just prior to Karma Changes, and of the forty, six of them are still negative. It looks like before the change, many times more posts were voted into the red. I have observed that a number of recent posts were in fact downvoted, sometimes a fair amount, but crept back up over time.
Hypothesis: the changes included removing the display minimum of 0 for top-level posts. Now that people can see that something has been voted negative, instead of just being at 0 (which could be the result of indifference), sympathy kicks in and people provide upvotes.
Is this a behavior we want? If not, what can we do about it?
One of the expected effects of the karma change is to make people more cautious about what they put in a top level post. Perhaps this is only evidence of that effect.
How many posts per week are presented now versus posts per week before the change?
ETA: I guess another argument for this is that someone who posts a bad post gets dropped below the threshold much faster.
No. It is not difficult to create a top level post that is approved of or at least kept at ‘0’. I want undesirable top level posts to hurt.
Replace all ‘-ve’ karma value displays of top level posts with ‘- points’ or ‘<0 points’. We don’t necessarily need to know just how disapproved of a particular post is.
It helps me as an author. −1 is a significant difference from −5.
Easily solved technically. Show actual figures to the author.
Agreed.
I’ve called before for median-based karma: you set a score you think a post should have and the median is used for display purposes, with “fake votes” reducing the influence of individual votes until there are enough to gain a true picture.
Arrow’s Theorem seems relevant...
Or not.
That doesn’t really avoid the issues in Arrow’s Theorem, merely blunts them, assuring us that we shouldn’t actually care about IIA. However, the fact that this karma scale is one-dimensional combined with the assumption that people have a singly-peaked preference function does show that this is one of those cases where Arrow’s Theorem doesn’t apply. Median is a good choice because it’s not terribly gamable.
Actually, the point of the linked article was that irrelevant alternatives aren’t. Rather, they reveal information about relative strengths of preferences IF, as Arrow’s Theorem’s assumes, you are restricted to voting methods involving ordinal ranking of the options.
Therefore, you can avoid the claimed problems by being able to express the magnitude of your preference, not just its ranking against others, which is the idea proposed here.
Sweet, thanks.
“One-dimensional” preferences are a special case, and I think solvable.
It could be sympathy, or a judgment that the poster shouldn’t be excessively discouraged from posting in the future.
Sure, why not? We can always change things later if we start getting overrun by bad posts, and people still aren’t willing to vote them down into negative territory.
There is a limited downvote budget for each voter (in some ratio to the voter’s budget). Downvoting a post now uses 10 points from that budget rather than 1, so perhaps low-karma downvoters (or downvoters who have exhausted their downvote budgets) are now having less of an impact.
I like seeing the negative number on my posts. But I have also noticed a voting trend that seems to be much more forgiving than the posts of old.
The first wave of readers seem to vote up; the second wave votes down; over time it stabilizes somewhere near where the first wave peaked. This doesn’t seem to happen on posts that are really superb.
I think showing the full number of up and down votes would be helpful to authors and also let people know why a post is at the number it is. Seeing +5 −7 is different than seeing −2.
That being said, karma inflation seems to be hitting. I am rarely getting downvoted on comments anymore. I don’t think I have improved that much as a commentator. I am not convinced that the effects you are seeing are only happening to Posts.
I think a great way to handle the Post karma is to hide the actual number for a week. Let it show + or—for positive or negative but no numbers. By the time one week has passed most people will have moved on.
Another solution may be to keep actual voting history available and let people see votes by people who said their history is public. As far as I can tell, that preference doesn’t do anything yet.
ETA: Another solution would be to set karma rewards to only happen after a certain threshold. Between 0 and +5 you don’t get any karma. After that, you get 10 karma per point. Everything under 0 still penalizes you 10 karma per point.
Or the above but only getting rewards after a certain percentage votes up. +5 −1 nets 40 karma, +20 −16 nets nothing, but each have a score of +4.
Voting history publication does do something—click on a user’s name, and then click “liked” or “disliked”, and you can see what top-level posts they have voted up or down. It just doesn’t work backwards, and doesn’t work for comments.
Ho ho! It does do something! Man, all these hidden features… thanks for the tip.
Debunking komponisto is negative but appears to have been removed from the list of recent posts.
Looking at the timestamps, seems that “Debunking komponisto” is newer than the grandparent, so I couldn’t have included it at the time.
Ah, okay. Wow, they’re close.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
If for example the cost was ten times the 25th percentile of post scores, you know you’ll lose Karma if your post is in the bottom quarter of less wrong posts.
Each upvote is worth 10 karma, each downvote is worth −15? Borderline and controversial posts would get hit hard by this.
Anything this complicated, though, owes it to the author to see both numbers.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
If for example the cost was ten times the 25th percentile, you know you’ll lose Karma if your post is in the bottom quarter of less wrong posts.
Make posting cost karma? That raises the break-even bar. I’m sure Open Threads etc that tend to sit near zero will magically get voted up to wherever that bar is after the rule change.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it sympathy. Sometimes I will up- (or down-) vote something if I think it is better (or worse) than its current score suggests. The purpose of karma on articles should be to identify those most worth reading to those who haven’t yet read them, not to be a popularity contest where everyone who disliked it votes it down forever.
I also tend to vote posts up or down based on what I think the score ought to be. But it seems clear that sympathy plays a part. Liked posts spiral freely off towards infinity but disliked posts don’t ever spiral down in a similar way. This gives a distinct bias to the expected payoff of posting borderline posts and so is probably not desirable.
Vote the posts up. One month later, reverse your vote. (Obviously your reasons for wanting a particular karma level for a post matter.)
This really messes with how I, as an author, rely on karma as feedback for how well my post was received.
I hate all karma games more complicated than, “I liked/disliked/didn’t-care-about this post.”
Sympathy upvotes are already games more complicated than “liked/disliked”.
It’s not a desirable solution. It’s just the best literal answer an individual can have to the “what can we do about it?” question that does not rely on political advocacy. It’s true whether or not people hate it.