The main reason to have a karma system, IMO, is to make discussions more readable by ordering comments by quality. This seems to work very well. Providing feedback to commenters is another important reason. But keeping a record of everyone’s accumulated karma isn’t necessary for either of those functions, and that feature could possibly be gotten rid of entirely.
“Readable” is the wrong word here—especially since the resulting distortion of the chronological ordering often makes discussions less readable. The actual intended object of maximization is not readability but rather impressiveness (showing off how “good” LW’s comments are to new readers), or something like that (see here ).
I disapprove of this, and think the purposes of karma are/should be these two: (1) to make trolls invisible; (2) to reward the authors of high-quality comments, thereby incentivizing the latter.
When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.
The main reason to have a karma system, IMO, is to make discussions more readable by ordering comments by quality. This seems to work very well. Providing feedback to commenters is another important reason. But keeping a record of everyone’s accumulated karma isn’t necessary for either of those functions, and that feature could possibly be gotten rid of entirely.
“Readable” is the wrong word here—especially since the resulting distortion of the chronological ordering often makes discussions less readable. The actual intended object of maximization is not readability but rather impressiveness (showing off how “good” LW’s comments are to new readers), or something like that (see here ).
I disapprove of this, and think the purposes of karma are/should be these two: (1) to make trolls invisible; (2) to reward the authors of high-quality comments, thereby incentivizing the latter.
When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.