Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things—all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work—but they have 0 karma to show for it.
We can fix this by having karma be multiplied when it is donated. So if I donate 100 karma to see some task completed that will reward the person who does that task with 200 karma. Another idea (that I prefer) is that the karma bounty you post is returned to you (as well as given to the other person) when a task is completed.
Also, there should probably be more incentives for gaining karma in general, as there are incentives for gaining upload ratio on what.cd. Rising through the karma ranks should give users special privileges that are actually desired.
On stackexchange style sites users are awarded with the power to do site admin tasks as a reward for tasking the karma ladder. For instance 2000 karma nets you the ability to edit others post (helpfully correcting broken links). Obviously there are still consequences if you use your powers for evil.
Independent of modifications to the karma system, more users should be given such editting powers. In particular the sequences could do with being more interlinked, and I would happily do this given the chance. Putting links to the next post in the sequence at the end of every post would increase their addictiveness substantially, pulling in more readers.
Finally, it occurs that making such modifications might use more work than simply making the changes that would otherwise have rewards posted for them.
Yes! Stackexchange/overflow is really well designed. There are many things which LW (and for that matter other most community sites) could learn from SE. Editing posts is a good one. They also do a really good job of making tags work well. We have a couple of editors but we could really use more.
I’d like to see that. throw in an editor that allows you to suggest changes, then two others have to approve it for it to be actioned. Follow this up with the post in question having a link at the bottom ‘Possible Changes Pending’ so that others can be notified and then power it up with a Karma connection
(Formula:(PostKarma/10/Editors changes) rounded up to one would give a single editor 5 points for a fifty point article, five editors with approximately equal changes one karma each… or 1 each for 4 and two for the fifth editor who contributed between 20% and 40% of the approved editor changes)
We can fix this by having karma be multiplied when it is donated. So if I donate 100 karma to see some task completed that will reward the person who does that task with 200 karma. Another idea (that I prefer) is that the karma bounty you post is returned to you (as well as given to the other person) when a task is completed.
On stackexchange style sites users are awarded with the power to do site admin tasks as a reward for tasking the karma ladder. For instance 2000 karma nets you the ability to edit others post (helpfully correcting broken links). Obviously there are still consequences if you use your powers for evil.
Independent of modifications to the karma system, more users should be given such editting powers. In particular the sequences could do with being more interlinked, and I would happily do this given the chance. Putting links to the next post in the sequence at the end of every post would increase their addictiveness substantially, pulling in more readers.
Finally, it occurs that making such modifications might use more work than simply making the changes that would otherwise have rewards posted for them.
Emphasis mine. I hope this was intentional, because man did that make me want editing powers.
Yes! Stackexchange/overflow is really well designed. There are many things which LW (and for that matter other most community sites) could learn from SE. Editing posts is a good one. They also do a really good job of making tags work well. We have a couple of editors but we could really use more.
What other lessons could LW learn from Stackexchange/overflow?
Here are some things that I suspect make tagging on SE work well:
Searching by tags works well
You can mark some tags as favorites so that they are prioritized or excluded for you
Tags prominently displayed
Tag suggestions based on commonly used tags/words used in your post : seems like a good idea
Lots of people can retag posts : seems like a good idea
Tag wiki pages: good idea, probably would not take much work
Information about ‘related tags’
Could just be that there are so many disparate topics that tags are more important
I’d like to see that. throw in an editor that allows you to suggest changes, then two others have to approve it for it to be actioned. Follow this up with the post in question having a link at the bottom ‘Possible Changes Pending’ so that others can be notified and then power it up with a Karma connection
(Formula:(PostKarma/10/Editors changes) rounded up to one would give a single editor 5 points for a fifty point article, five editors with approximately equal changes one karma each… or 1 each for 4 and two for the fifth editor who contributed between 20% and 40% of the approved editor changes)