This strategy only seems to make sense if I believe that the total karma score of a comment is intended to reflect the number of people who happened to read it and think it significantly above/below average, rather than reflect the relative quality of the comment. For example, if I believe that a comment ranking 20 isn’t necessarily considered any better by its readers than one ranking 2, it may just have ten times as many readers (e.g., because it’s part of a popular thread).
If that weren’t the case, it would seem to follow that each voter wasn’t voting independently, but was instead taking other voters’ behavior into account.
But I observe that many people do treat a comment ranking 20 as having been judged as better by its readers than a comment ranking 2.
Which suggests the situation is more complicated than how you present it here.
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.
This strategy only seems to make sense if I believe that the total karma score of a comment is intended to reflect the number of people who happened to read it and think it significantly above/below average, rather than reflect the relative quality of the comment. For example, if I believe that a comment ranking 20 isn’t necessarily considered any better by its readers than one ranking 2, it may just have ten times as many readers (e.g., because it’s part of a popular thread).
If that weren’t the case, it would seem to follow that each voter wasn’t voting independently, but was instead taking other voters’ behavior into account.
But I observe that many people do treat a comment ranking 20 as having been judged as better by its readers than a comment ranking 2.
Which suggests the situation is more complicated than how you present it here.
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.