Meta: It feels weird to give people karma for linkposts to things they didn’t write. StackExchange has a “community wiki” flag for posts that means they award no reputation (and that everyone can edit them); should we have something like that?
I feel something like “giving you half karma capped at a certain number” seems more reasonable, since someone is still providing a valuable service to the community by posting it.
Well, that’s part of the problem though. I think it’s very good that this paper exists but I didn’t upvote this post because it felt weird to me. So the low karma total doesn’t reflect the goodness of the link.
I’m obviously a bit biased here but I generally think worrying too much about who gets karma is an antipattern. I posted this link because I came across the paper, it had been out for a few days, none of the authors had shared it here, so seemed worth sharing with the LW community, but with karma having a logarithmic impact on capability on the site it would require a lot of link gaming (which I assume is the main adversarial, free-riding behavior we don’t want to encourage here) for someone to get lots of useful karma without doing anything other than being first to post links to things that will get upvotes.
Or put another way I think there’s enough noise in karma that you don’t need to worry about it; it’ll take a lot of karma “misattribution” to have a serious impact on the quality of the site.
Also, just out of curiosity, would you have felt differently about voting if I had, say, provided an executive summary rather than just giving the link?
Meta: It feels weird to give people karma for linkposts to things they didn’t write. StackExchange has a “community wiki” flag for posts that means they award no reputation (and that everyone can edit them); should we have something like that?
I feel something like “giving you half karma capped at a certain number” seems more reasonable, since someone is still providing a valuable service to the community by posting it.
So far, I’ve never seen this sort of link post get that much karma, so I’m not too worried about it.
Well, that’s part of the problem though. I think it’s very good that this paper exists but I didn’t upvote this post because it felt weird to me. So the low karma total doesn’t reflect the goodness of the link.
I’m obviously a bit biased here but I generally think worrying too much about who gets karma is an antipattern. I posted this link because I came across the paper, it had been out for a few days, none of the authors had shared it here, so seemed worth sharing with the LW community, but with karma having a logarithmic impact on capability on the site it would require a lot of link gaming (which I assume is the main adversarial, free-riding behavior we don’t want to encourage here) for someone to get lots of useful karma without doing anything other than being first to post links to things that will get upvotes.
Or put another way I think there’s enough noise in karma that you don’t need to worry about it; it’ll take a lot of karma “misattribution” to have a serious impact on the quality of the site.
Also, just out of curiosity, would you have felt differently about voting if I had, say, provided an executive summary rather than just giving the link?
That’s fair. And yes, I would have been happy to vote if you’d provided a one-paragraph summary or something.