Laziness—the marginal benefit of voting on something decreases with the absolute value of its current karma, but the cost of voting stays constant.
To prevent the “rich get richer” phenomenon, where if everyone pays more attention to posts/comments that have higher karma, but votes independently without regard to current karma, a comment or post that initially gets some upvotes would attract more attention and more upvotes. Similarly, if everyone did that, comments that arrive late or are in deeper threads or in unpopular posts will have much lower karma than more visible comments of similar quality. In other words, the karma would reflect visibility*quality rather than just quality and it would be hard for readers to recover the quality signal from that.
Doesn’t this attitude obviously defeat the entire purpose of the voting system?!
… if everyone pays more attention to posts/comments that have higher karma, but votes independently without regard to current karma …
Do people do this? They shouldn’t! (I certainly don’t.)
(You might say: “yes, Said, maybe you don’t, but most people do, and we’re not talking about your should-world”; but actually, we are talking about exactly that, aren’t we? So the question is whether that should-world is consistent. I think it is.)
Laziness …
That does not seem to have much to do with “how much karma something should have”, though. (Or rather, it does, but only if you already assume a notion of “how much karma something should have”; laziness cannot explain this notion.)
Doesn’t this attitude obviously defeat the entire purpose of the voting system?!
Can you say more about this?
Karma is supposed to aggregate the commentariat’s opinions of posts/comments. If votes don’t express those opinions in the first place, then there’s nothing to aggregate and karma becomes pointless.
I do this myself for a couple of reasons:
Laziness—the marginal benefit of voting on something decreases with the absolute value of its current karma, but the cost of voting stays constant.
To prevent the “rich get richer” phenomenon, where if everyone pays more attention to posts/comments that have higher karma, but votes independently without regard to current karma, a comment or post that initially gets some upvotes would attract more attention and more upvotes. Similarly, if everyone did that, comments that arrive late or are in deeper threads or in unpopular posts will have much lower karma than more visible comments of similar quality. In other words, the karma would reflect visibility*quality rather than just quality and it would be hard for readers to recover the quality signal from that.
Can you say more about this?
Do people do this? They shouldn’t! (I certainly don’t.)
(You might say: “yes, Said, maybe you don’t, but most people do, and we’re not talking about your should-world”; but actually, we are talking about exactly that, aren’t we? So the question is whether that should-world is consistent. I think it is.)
That does not seem to have much to do with “how much karma something should have”, though. (Or rather, it does, but only if you already assume a notion of “how much karma something should have”; laziness cannot explain this notion.)
Karma is supposed to aggregate the commentariat’s opinions of posts/comments. If votes don’t express those opinions in the first place, then there’s nothing to aggregate and karma becomes pointless.