Indeed it is complicated. I’ve previously contemplated voting down posts that I like a lot in order to encourage other folks to voted them back up to their “deserved” level. Then I could reverse my vote when most other folks had stopped voting. This would double the impact of my vote.
Sure, that’s a complicated-but-likely-efficient strategy for doubling the impact of your vote.
This sort of thing always strikes me as silly, though. If what I want to do is maximize my impact on the karma scores of comments, it’s easier to just create lots of dummy accounts and vote with them.
Yes, yes, I understand that this is against the local conventions of the site, and I’m not suggesting that people do it. However, it is perhaps instructive to consider why those conventions exist, and whether the existence of those reasons has further implications in terms of what sort of behavior is desirable.
From my perspective, the whole notion of trying to maximize the impact of my vote distorts the purpose of a system intended to communicate information about collective preferences. But of course nobody is obligated to share my beliefs about the purpose of the karma system, or to value that purpose even if they do.
Indeed it is complicated. I’ve previously contemplated voting down posts that I like a lot in order to encourage other folks to voted them back up to their “deserved” level. Then I could reverse my vote when most other folks had stopped voting. This would double the impact of my vote.
Sure, that’s a complicated-but-likely-efficient strategy for doubling the impact of your vote.
This sort of thing always strikes me as silly, though. If what I want to do is maximize my impact on the karma scores of comments, it’s easier to just create lots of dummy accounts and vote with them.
Yes, yes, I understand that this is against the local conventions of the site, and I’m not suggesting that people do it. However, it is perhaps instructive to consider why those conventions exist, and whether the existence of those reasons has further implications in terms of what sort of behavior is desirable.
From my perspective, the whole notion of trying to maximize the impact of my vote distorts the purpose of a system intended to communicate information about collective preferences. But of course nobody is obligated to share my beliefs about the purpose of the karma system, or to value that purpose even if they do.
I was going to criticise this, but then I thought, “well, serves people right for voting tactically”.
Gotta say though, if everyone did that, we’d have a huge mess.