I generally don’t trust karma systems on discussion/comment sites, period. They seem to tend over time to get subverted into one of several different failure modes:
Enforcement of group-think
Status games unrelated to site/discussion content
Mechanical manipulation of karma thresholds for the lulz ^W ^W trolling purposes
I was going to mention examples of each from other sites, but decided that that wasn’t very useful, because it would require familiarity with those sites, and possibly inspire quibbling over particular cases. I haven’t been around Less Wrong long enough to observe how well it works here.
I generally don’t trust karma systems on discussion/comment sites, period. They seem to tend over time to get subverted into one of several different failure modes:
Enforcement of group-think
Status games unrelated to site/discussion content
Mechanical manipulation of karma thresholds for the lulz ^W ^W trolling purposes
I was going to mention examples of each from other sites, but decided that that wasn’t very useful, because it would require familiarity with those sites, and possibly inspire quibbling over particular cases. I haven’t been around Less Wrong long enough to observe how well it works here.
The general case was analysed by Clay Shirky in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
[Those of us around Wikipedia reading Shirky’s article in 2004-2005 giggled in horror at Wikipedia being named as an aversion of this trope.]
Basically, every social space (in general) grows and dies. This is normal. Start new ones as the old ones go bad.