I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
I don’t know about a meta-thread, but the rule of thumb I’ve seen quoted often is “upvote what you want more of; downvote what you want less of.” Karma scores are intended, on this view, as an indicator of how many people (net) want more entries like that.
One implication of this view is that a score of 40 isn’t “ten times better” than a score of 4, it just means that many more people want to see posts like this than don’t want to.
Of course, this view competes with people’s entirely predictable tendency to treat karma as an indicator of the entry’s (and the user’s) overall worth, or as a game to maximize one’s score on, or as a form of reward/punishment.
Equally predictably, this predictable but unintended use of karma far far far outweighs the intended use.
Karma-maximizing is often but not always a good approximation to worth-as-judged-by-community maximizing, which is a good thing to maximize.
Yes. The question is how significant the gap between “often” and “always” is.
Though if you have a target audience in mind, it is sometimes worth posting things that will be downvoted by the community-at-large.
(I’ve been doing this a lot recently, though I plan on cutting back and regaining some general rationalist credibility.)