And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.
There is a huge difference between mass downvoting happening to an experienced user or to a new user. The experienced user has a lot of karma to waste; and they also have a long history of feedback that their contributions are welcomed by the community. The new user will more likely evaluate the feedback incorrectly (as a dislike by community, as opposed to by a single user who happens to be not representative of the community), and in extreme cases can even lose the ability to post.
My main concern is the abuse of downvotes against new users, which happened in the past, and where in most cases we will never know it happened, because the new users will disappear without giving feedback to the community.
An inefficient way would do. But maybe “shockingly inefficient” is as good as it gets. The Reddit database architecture (which IIRC LW uses) is … unusual.
There is a huge difference between mass downvoting happening to an experienced user or to a new user. The experienced user has a lot of karma to waste; and they also have a long history of feedback that their contributions are welcomed by the community. The new user will more likely evaluate the feedback incorrectly (as a dislike by community, as opposed to by a single user who happens to be not representative of the community), and in extreme cases can even lose the ability to post.
My main concern is the abuse of downvotes against new users, which happened in the past, and where in most cases we will never know it happened, because the new users will disappear without giving feedback to the community.
As I mentioned before, this is a technical problem that should have a technical solution.
The relevant political question is how do we get the ability to do something about the code base of LW.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an efficient way to get information about karma voting patterns.
An inefficient way would do. But maybe “shockingly inefficient” is as good as it gets. The Reddit database architecture (which IIRC LW uses) is … unusual.