Why not divide a post’s number of up-votes by the number of unique logged-in people who have viewed it? This would correct for the distortion of scores caused by varying numbers of readers. Some old stuff is very good but not read much, and scores are in general inflating as the Less Wrong population grows.
I think such a change would be orthogonal to karma accounting; I’m only suggesting a change in the number displayed next to each post.
For comments, these are loaded without most readers reading them. Furthermore, the likelihood that any single comment will be read decreases with the number of all comments. It seems like this would work much less well for comments.
How about per-capita post scoring?
Why not divide a post’s number of up-votes by the number of unique logged-in people who have viewed it? This would correct for the distortion of scores caused by varying numbers of readers. Some old stuff is very good but not read much, and scores are in general inflating as the Less Wrong population grows.
I think such a change would be orthogonal to karma accounting; I’m only suggesting a change in the number displayed next to each post.
For posts, this might work.
For comments, these are loaded without most readers reading them. Furthermore, the likelihood that any single comment will be read decreases with the number of all comments. It seems like this would work much less well for comments.