I used to think this Karma Score stuff would be helpful to filter low quality posts. But I see many people get downvoted for tribal reasons and I also see many upvotes on posts that I have trouble deciphering (sockpuppets?). So usually, when I see a post downvoted to oblivion I end up clicking on it anyways which defeats the whole purpose of using the Karma Score to help me filter out bad posts. I also waste a bunch of cycles wondering about the votes (who are these people).
TL;DR I have decided to try using firefox to view lesswrong with the anti-kibitzing option turned on (see preferences).
Depends whether you’re talking intended purpose or actual function. The intended purpose of the karma system is to make low-quality comments less visible. It doesn’t do a very good job of that here; it does a better job in Reddit where there’s a larger userbase and threads are sorted by karma by default, since most people don’t read all the way to the bottom of a thread, but collapsing threads doesn’t do much.
The actual function of karma is to gently incentivize posting things interesting to the community, to somewhat less gently disincentivize content-free posts, and to not-at-all-gently dissuade persistent cranks and trolls and short-circuit discussions of things that’re really strongly disapproved of (the so-called troll toll, though most of its victims are not trolls). I don’t think this is a bad thing on balance—community can be undervalued in nerdy circles, so it’s handy to have a semi-mechanical way of encouraging it without everything degenerating into cat pictures -- but one shouldn’t mistake it for something it’s not.
I haven’t seen much evidence of widespread use of sockpuppets.
The actual function of Karma as you describe doesn’t bother me. I’ll continue voting as usual. The anti-kibitzing option just hides the votes so I don’t see them. For me I hope out of sight out of mind actually works for this problem.
I used to think this Karma Score stuff would be helpful to filter low quality posts. But I see many people get downvoted for tribal reasons and I also see many upvotes on posts that I have trouble deciphering (sockpuppets?). So usually, when I see a post downvoted to oblivion I end up clicking on it anyways which defeats the whole purpose of using the Karma Score to help me filter out bad posts. I also waste a bunch of cycles wondering about the votes (who are these people).
TL;DR I have decided to try using firefox to view lesswrong with the anti-kibitzing option turned on (see preferences).
Depends whether you’re talking intended purpose or actual function. The intended purpose of the karma system is to make low-quality comments less visible. It doesn’t do a very good job of that here; it does a better job in Reddit where there’s a larger userbase and threads are sorted by karma by default, since most people don’t read all the way to the bottom of a thread, but collapsing threads doesn’t do much.
The actual function of karma is to gently incentivize posting things interesting to the community, to somewhat less gently disincentivize content-free posts, and to not-at-all-gently dissuade persistent cranks and trolls and short-circuit discussions of things that’re really strongly disapproved of (the so-called troll toll, though most of its victims are not trolls). I don’t think this is a bad thing on balance—community can be undervalued in nerdy circles, so it’s handy to have a semi-mechanical way of encouraging it without everything degenerating into cat pictures -- but one shouldn’t mistake it for something it’s not.
I haven’t seen much evidence of widespread use of sockpuppets.
The actual function of Karma as you describe doesn’t bother me. I’ll continue voting as usual. The anti-kibitzing option just hides the votes so I don’t see them. For me I hope out of sight out of mind actually works for this problem.