We should expect that anyone should be able to get over 1000 karma if they hang around the site long enough.
I second this worry. Historically, karma on LW has been a very good indicator of hours of life burned on the site, and a somewhat worse indicator of other things.
We have an upcoming blogpost that goes into both the problems we’re concerned about solving, and our thoughts on how to resolve them, and I’ll probably hold off till then to dive into this too much. (I’ll probably respond once more with quick clarifications if need be and if there’s a lot more to discuss, will do so when I can dedicate a good chunk of time to it)
But it seems like there are actually 2 (3?) different issues here and I’m not sure which of them is more significant:
I. Should we become more like a network of personal blogs than a forum? This is certainly a marked change. The main reason we’re considering the idea is because many people do seem to prefer discussing things in personal-blog-like spaces—sometimes because they own the space, other times because someone they trust owns the space and they have more of a sense that it’s in the control of someone they trust (and people vary in what sort of people they trust and how they want discussions curated)
II. Is Karma a reasonable tool to determine trust? For any features that we might want to limit to trusted users.
Both questions are important, I wanted to make sure I didn’t respond to one if the crux of the disagreement was more about the other.
Re: the Karma question(disclaimer: this is just some high level examples, not concrete plans)
If not karma, how would you determine who gets access to trusted permissions? The two main solutions I can see here is “some kind of systemized approach” and “fiat, careful decisions by the site admins.” Both of them seem to have risks and issues. Systems can be gamed. Discretion of admins or existing trusted users can become insular.
(The third option of “don’t ever create tools that can only be given to ‘trusted’ people is impractical since, at the very least, someone needs to deal with spam and trolls”, and as the site grows you will need to grant that power to more people to deal with higher volume)
It’s perhaps worth noting that I see karma as “the system we come up with to allocate trust, which will change over time as we think more about it”, as opposed to “the system as currently implemented now.”
There could be different types of karma to reflect trust in different domains (i.e. “I trust you to write things that are worth reading” vs “I trust you to care about making sure discussions are productive”).
I do suspect both systemized and discretionary trust will end up playing a role—perhaps with certain permissions granted automatically by something-like-karma, and allowing trusted users to manually add newer users if they trust the new users’ outside-site accomplishments and decision making.
If people have ideas for third options that seem radically different from either of those approaches, I’m interested.
I second this worry. Historically, karma on LW has been a very good indicator of hours of life burned on the site, and a somewhat worse indicator of other things.
We have an upcoming blogpost that goes into both the problems we’re concerned about solving, and our thoughts on how to resolve them, and I’ll probably hold off till then to dive into this too much. (I’ll probably respond once more with quick clarifications if need be and if there’s a lot more to discuss, will do so when I can dedicate a good chunk of time to it)
But it seems like there are actually 2 (3?) different issues here and I’m not sure which of them is more significant:
I. Should we become more like a network of personal blogs than a forum? This is certainly a marked change. The main reason we’re considering the idea is because many people do seem to prefer discussing things in personal-blog-like spaces—sometimes because they own the space, other times because someone they trust owns the space and they have more of a sense that it’s in the control of someone they trust (and people vary in what sort of people they trust and how they want discussions curated)
II. Is Karma a reasonable tool to determine trust? For any features that we might want to limit to trusted users.
Both questions are important, I wanted to make sure I didn’t respond to one if the crux of the disagreement was more about the other.
Re: the Karma question (disclaimer: this is just some high level examples, not concrete plans)
If not karma, how would you determine who gets access to trusted permissions? The two main solutions I can see here is “some kind of systemized approach” and “fiat, careful decisions by the site admins.” Both of them seem to have risks and issues. Systems can be gamed. Discretion of admins or existing trusted users can become insular.
(The third option of “don’t ever create tools that can only be given to ‘trusted’ people is impractical since, at the very least, someone needs to deal with spam and trolls”, and as the site grows you will need to grant that power to more people to deal with higher volume)
It’s perhaps worth noting that I see karma as “the system we come up with to allocate trust, which will change over time as we think more about it”, as opposed to “the system as currently implemented now.”
There could be different types of karma to reflect trust in different domains (i.e. “I trust you to write things that are worth reading” vs “I trust you to care about making sure discussions are productive”).
I do suspect both systemized and discretionary trust will end up playing a role—perhaps with certain permissions granted automatically by something-like-karma, and allowing trusted users to manually add newer users if they trust the new users’ outside-site accomplishments and decision making.
If people have ideas for third options that seem radically different from either of those approaches, I’m interested.