I would feel much better about rate-limiting people’s ability to assign karma to posts, restricting that power to more established (high-karma) users, and giving users more control over the visibility they assign to specific users, users with certain karma scores, and so on. I am open to severely restricting the ability to assign karma, much more so than the ability to write comments, and only then basing more severe punishments such as rate limiting on the basis of karma.
I strongly don’t agree with this one. If anything, I think people should vote (honestly) more often. It’s a valuable signal. If it weren’t this easy, we wouldn’t get the feedback at all. If I got rate-limited on voting, I’d still be reading the same number of posts, but it would be too much extra work to budget my allocation to the most important things I’d read, so I wouldn’t bother.
I do worry about karma getting gamed. We’ve already had an issue with that, with one user mass-downvoting unrelated old posts of another as a means of attack for a current dispute. The mods are on top of it for now, but I could imagine other exploits we haven’t thought of popping up. I just don’t think rate limits on votes are the answer.
Hm. In theory, I agree with you—I think a good equilibrium (ignoring the cost of taking the time to vote on stuff all the time) would be lots and lots of voting to express views on how worthwhile the content is.
Let me articulate a little bit more of how I perceive karma being used in practice on LW.
Sometimes, it’s a scout-mindset way of saying “this is a worthwhile comment. It should be more visible, I think people widely agree on that, and I’m going to help it out by upvoting.” It’s a similar function to what Kriss describes as the old function of hipsters. This is good and I would want this sort of voting to continue unrestricted.
Sometimes, it’s a soldier-mindset way of saying “I’m on the side that’s for/against this point, and I have to up/downvote it lest it appear that the other side is more popular!” In soldier-mindset situations where the post supports the majority view, this looks like a lot of upvotes, but with many more total votes than upvotes. If the post supports a minority view, this looks like a post with a decent number of downvotes, a couple upvotes, never getting much oxygen because the soldier-mindset majority has inevitably suppressed it. Overall, this seems bad for site epistemics, and I would want to see zero or rate-limited voting in these situations.
Sometimes, it’s a more intimate way of expressing warmth/appreciation/encouragement or saying “I read this,” or coldness/discouragement, where you often can guess exactly who upvoted/downvoted you. Here, upvotes seem good (a signal of a valuable discussion), whereas downvotes seem bad (by creating bad feelings while not actually terminating an unproductive discussion, and potentially catalyzing demon thread formation).
I think that if LW implemented rate-limited voting, we’d still get the scout-mindset form of voting, and my intuition is that most people, especially established users, would mainly choose to spend their upvotes on rewarding quality content, punishing unusually bad content, and encouraging conversations they’d like to have. And they would reallocate votes away from sides-taking contests and demon threads.
I could be very wrong about that, but it’s these intuitions that make me support rate-limited voting.
I strongly don’t agree with this one. If anything, I think people should vote (honestly) more often. It’s a valuable signal. If it weren’t this easy, we wouldn’t get the feedback at all. If I got rate-limited on voting, I’d still be reading the same number of posts, but it would be too much extra work to budget my allocation to the most important things I’d read, so I wouldn’t bother.
I do worry about karma getting gamed. We’ve already had an issue with that, with one user mass-downvoting unrelated old posts of another as a means of attack for a current dispute. The mods are on top of it for now, but I could imagine other exploits we haven’t thought of popping up. I just don’t think rate limits on votes are the answer.
Hm. In theory, I agree with you—I think a good equilibrium (ignoring the cost of taking the time to vote on stuff all the time) would be lots and lots of voting to express views on how worthwhile the content is.
Let me articulate a little bit more of how I perceive karma being used in practice on LW.
Sometimes, it’s a scout-mindset way of saying “this is a worthwhile comment. It should be more visible, I think people widely agree on that, and I’m going to help it out by upvoting.” It’s a similar function to what Kriss describes as the old function of hipsters. This is good and I would want this sort of voting to continue unrestricted.
Sometimes, it’s a soldier-mindset way of saying “I’m on the side that’s for/against this point, and I have to up/downvote it lest it appear that the other side is more popular!” In soldier-mindset situations where the post supports the majority view, this looks like a lot of upvotes, but with many more total votes than upvotes. If the post supports a minority view, this looks like a post with a decent number of downvotes, a couple upvotes, never getting much oxygen because the soldier-mindset majority has inevitably suppressed it. Overall, this seems bad for site epistemics, and I would want to see zero or rate-limited voting in these situations.
Sometimes, it’s a more intimate way of expressing warmth/appreciation/encouragement or saying “I read this,” or coldness/discouragement, where you often can guess exactly who upvoted/downvoted you. Here, upvotes seem good (a signal of a valuable discussion), whereas downvotes seem bad (by creating bad feelings while not actually terminating an unproductive discussion, and potentially catalyzing demon thread formation).
I think that if LW implemented rate-limited voting, we’d still get the scout-mindset form of voting, and my intuition is that most people, especially established users, would mainly choose to spend their upvotes on rewarding quality content, punishing unusually bad content, and encouraging conversations they’d like to have. And they would reallocate votes away from sides-taking contests and demon threads.
I could be very wrong about that, but it’s these intuitions that make me support rate-limited voting.