Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.
Now you have me wondering what a zero-sum game for karma would look like on LessWrong.
(Or on Reddit, for that matter.)
My guess goes to “pretty ugly”.
Could be interesting, though. Maybe if we made it clear that the karma didn’t actually stand for anything...
No, who am I kidding. We’re humans; Pavlovian conditioning is a thing. In our society, numbers going up are in and of themselves a reward. It’d probably get pretty tribal, I’d imagine; LW’s claims of rationality notwithstanding, we seem to devolve into heated arguments quite frequently.
(And speaking of of LW’s “rationality”: I registered an account here last November, but I’ve been a lurker long before that, and it seems like the signal-to-noise ratio of LW has dropped significantly since the “good old days”. Any ideas on why? Is it because of people like Eliezer and Scott having mostly deserted LW? Or is it the influx of new users causing an overall decrease in average quality, because the gems are getting buried in heaps of dung, so to speak? Do we need more people going around downvoting everything, thomblake-style?)
Are you sure it was what you thought it was in the good old days rather than the dazzle of the new (or at least newly phrased)?
It’s possible that it was the “dazzle of the new”, as you put it, but there seemed to be a genuinely higher quality comments section as well, in the sense there were less heated discussions. I mean, compare the quality of discussion here versus that of the discussion, say, here. Now, you could argue that there’s a qualitative difference here—abstract thoughts about AI versus feminism, a highly politicized topic—and I would agree that that’s a legitimate distinction to make, but still: there used to be a time when LW wouldn’t really bring up political discussion at all unless it was strictly relevant. And even when politics was brought up, like, say, here, there was a genuine effort to remain polite and on-topic which, frankly, I’m not really seeing as much in the newer threads. Maybe I’m just imagining things; I don’t know. But even if I am, I can only describe my own impressions—and right now, in my impression, there really does seem to have been a definite drop in the quality of discussion.