Seconding this. A nonobvious quirk of the system where high-karma users get more vote weight is that it increases variance for posts with few votes: if a high-karma user or two who don’t like you see your post first, they can trash the initial score in a way that doesn’t reflect “the community’s” consensus. I remember the early karma scores for one of my posts going from 20 to zero (!). It eventually finished at 131.
I’ve also noticed this phenomenon. I wonder if a solution would be to have an initial period where votes are considered more democratically, and then after that period the influence of high-karma users are applied (including back applying the influence of votes that occured during the intial period). I can also imagine downsides to this.
Seconding this. A nonobvious quirk of the system where high-karma users get more vote weight is that it increases variance for posts with few votes: if a high-karma user or two who don’t like you see your post first, they can trash the initial score in a way that doesn’t reflect “the community’s” consensus. I remember the early karma scores for one of my posts going from 20 to zero (!). It eventually finished at 131.
I’ve also noticed this phenomenon. I wonder if a solution would be to have an initial period where votes are considered more democratically, and then after that period the influence of high-karma users are applied (including back applying the influence of votes that occured during the intial period). I can also imagine downsides to this.