I think a lot of reaction against wide-ranging-upvotes is that upvote/downvote used to mean something clear and legible, and (both with the original advent of LW2.0, and more so here), it’s turning to something less legible.
And I think, importantly, the legible version of it was wrong – the sort of thing that’s easy to measure but not the actual thing I care about.
So one option is to make peace with the fact that karma-scores don’t refer to a clearly legible thing.
Another thing, which might be correct, is to make karma even less legible – rather than have it look superficially like other karma systems that refers to a sort-of-legible thing, instead karma is just, like, a percentage-score “how good is this post probably?” or, hell, like, a color, or doesn’t appear at all or something.
(Or a combination, where for the sake of transparency the meta-data of what’s going on under the hood is showed on hoverover, but the top-level result of karma is a color/percentage/vague-thing-of-some-sort)
Some important background thoughts here:
I think a lot of reaction against wide-ranging-upvotes is that upvote/downvote used to mean something clear and legible, and (both with the original advent of LW2.0, and more so here), it’s turning to something less legible.
And I think, importantly, the legible version of it was wrong – the sort of thing that’s easy to measure but not the actual thing I care about.
So one option is to make peace with the fact that karma-scores don’t refer to a clearly legible thing.
Another thing, which might be correct, is to make karma even less legible – rather than have it look superficially like other karma systems that refers to a sort-of-legible thing, instead karma is just, like, a percentage-score “how good is this post probably?” or, hell, like, a color, or doesn’t appear at all or something.
(Or a combination, where for the sake of transparency the meta-data of what’s going on under the hood is showed on hoverover, but the top-level result of karma is a color/percentage/vague-thing-of-some-sort)