My assumption here is that the outcome of options #3 and #4 are fairly similar. If Great Comment is 3x as good as Good comment, then option #3 looks something like “33% chance of upvoting” and option #4 is “upvote if it’s less than about 33 karma. Possibly downvote if it’s got so much karma that it’s getting sorted higher than the Great Comment.”
How similar the outcomes are depends on some of the precise numbers, but I think the order-of-magnitude* is about the same.
*where by order-of-magnitude I mean “base 4 order of magnitude”, which is the comparison that usually seems most relevant to me.
Option #4 is not “thread-safe”. It therefore can, and very likely will, cause chaotic behavior with unpredictable and potentially quite undesirable attractors.
Edit: Note that we may already observe this taking place.
Doublechecking what you mean by “thread-safe” (multiple people looking at the same thing at the same time making decisions before they see what other people do?)
Cool. That doesn’t seem like that big an issue to me, because the system has built-in error correction – people come back later, see that it’s slid past whichever direction they thought it should go, and can change their vote. It more robustly converges on Good Comment getting a proportionally correct-ish score (whereas the “roll a die in your head, upvote 33% of the time” will some non-trivial portion of the time result in things getting way-the-hell upvoted (or not) that should have been).
I should note: I don’t all think this is necessarily the best approach, just, it’s an approach that seems “reasonable” enough that describing it as ‘defeating the point of the voting system’ doesn’t seem accurate.
The core of the problem remains: it requires users to know what other users are doing (as well as how many other users there are, and how many other users are paying attention to a comment, and other such things). The cognitive overhead is tremendously higher. The potential for error is (thus) also much higher.
My assumption here is that the outcome of options #3 and #4 are fairly similar. If Great Comment is 3x as good as Good comment, then option #3 looks something like “33% chance of upvoting” and option #4 is “upvote if it’s less than about 33 karma. Possibly downvote if it’s got so much karma that it’s getting sorted higher than the Great Comment.”
How similar the outcomes are depends on some of the precise numbers, but I think the order-of-magnitude* is about the same.
*where by order-of-magnitude I mean “base 4 order of magnitude”, which is the comparison that usually seems most relevant to me.
Option #4 is not “thread-safe”. It therefore can, and very likely will, cause chaotic behavior with unpredictable and potentially quite undesirable attractors.
Edit: Note that we may already observe this taking place.
Doublechecking what you mean by “thread-safe” (multiple people looking at the same thing at the same time making decisions before they see what other people do?)
Right.
Cool. That doesn’t seem like that big an issue to me, because the system has built-in error correction – people come back later, see that it’s slid past whichever direction they thought it should go, and can change their vote. It more robustly converges on Good Comment getting a proportionally correct-ish score (whereas the “roll a die in your head, upvote 33% of the time” will some non-trivial portion of the time result in things getting way-the-hell upvoted (or not) that should have been).
I should note: I don’t all think this is necessarily the best approach, just, it’s an approach that seems “reasonable” enough that describing it as ‘defeating the point of the voting system’ doesn’t seem accurate.
The core of the problem remains: it requires users to know what other users are doing (as well as how many other users there are, and how many other users are paying attention to a comment, and other such things). The cognitive overhead is tremendously higher. The potential for error is (thus) also much higher.