I like that you are trying to trying to make your approach to voting explicit.
I believe people will usually vote based on something like “Upvote if this is content represents what I think Lesswrong should be”. It depends on the content of the post or the comment what this means exactly. In many cases it should mean whether a post or comment should contribute to truthfinding on a topic. This should imply, for example, that posts that contain empirical claims should contain some kind of empirical evidence, and that conclusions are valid. It also implies that the identity of the author should not be a reason for upvoting.
Compared to websites that do not have a voting-system, I see the disadvantage that anonymity of voting implies that you can judge things without giving and evaluating arguments. This does not matter very much as long as we are talking about content that is not very emotional. It matters when we are talking about politics; partisan fellow-feeling can then drive behavior.
(Personally, I get the impression that the pandemic situation has brought more politics to LW and that a certain kind of partisan voting has become more common, and I don’t like this trend. But my sample is not yet large enough to form a good judgement.)
Yeah. I think I agree that it gets worse as you move towards news-like topics, and focusing on covid definitely has tradeoffs on the front. Though overall covid content is pretty small, and I don’t expect to continue to move in that direction, I expect crises on this level that it’s worth us engaging with to be no more than once per decade.
I think the karma system generally does a standup job of promoting the good stuff to my attention and occasionally punishing (with a negative score) stuff that’s bad. I do think there are worries about short term incentives and scoring, and I’d like to remedy that in part by creating better long-term incentives. I’m just about to get back to work on the book of the LW 2018 Review, to set things in motion for us to output a book like that annually. The combination of Review+Book I hope will feel to authors much more valuable+rewarding than week-to-week karma scores.
Related: do mods consider karma when deciding what to curate? Obviously something in the negatives is unlikely to warrant curation, but is a higher karma score considered a positive signal past whatever minimum bar?
(Speaking for my own internal reward function, I like writing posts that get high karma, but I’d like writing a post that gets curated much more)
Speaking for myself, when I consider what post to curate, I let my attention naturally go to the top 5 or so recent high karma posts, as well as to the posts that other mods nominated (we have a mod-only UI that shows all curation nominations). I also ask myself what posts I liked lately, and occasionally when I read a post I immediately think “wow this was excellent, I bet I’ll want to curate this 5 days from now” and nominate it. For example, this happened with a post recently, where I wrote a comment about why I liked the post as soon as I read it, and then still endorsed it 4 days later and curated it.
Overall karma plays an important role in what posts I consider. But to answer your specific question, about whether a higher karma score is something I consider a positive signal, the answer is no.
My rough internal question is “Was this idea important/interesting/useful enough, and was it written clearly/concisely/enjoyably enough?” and don’t care about the karma. That generally produces a binary “yes/no”.
The main way I use karma is to second-guess myself. If I think a post should be curated, but it only got like 35 karma, then I will spend some time considering the hypothesis that “This post is really well aimed at Ben in particular, and actually a lot of people won’t be that interested to read this.”
I would like to add that I find politics important and found the pandemic posts mostly very useful and readable. But writing politics requires strong self-discipline if a rationalist standard of discussion should be maintained, in particular by readers who vote.
I like that you are trying to trying to make your approach to voting explicit.
I believe people will usually vote based on something like “Upvote if this is content represents what I think Lesswrong should be”. It depends on the content of the post or the comment what this means exactly. In many cases it should mean whether a post or comment should contribute to truthfinding on a topic. This should imply, for example, that posts that contain empirical claims should contain some kind of empirical evidence, and that conclusions are valid. It also implies that the identity of the author should not be a reason for upvoting.
Compared to websites that do not have a voting-system, I see the disadvantage that anonymity of voting implies that you can judge things without giving and evaluating arguments. This does not matter very much as long as we are talking about content that is not very emotional. It matters when we are talking about politics; partisan fellow-feeling can then drive behavior.
(Personally, I get the impression that the pandemic situation has brought more politics to LW and that a certain kind of partisan voting has become more common, and I don’t like this trend. But my sample is not yet large enough to form a good judgement.)
Yeah. I think I agree that it gets worse as you move towards news-like topics, and focusing on covid definitely has tradeoffs on the front. Though overall covid content is pretty small, and I don’t expect to continue to move in that direction, I expect crises on this level that it’s worth us engaging with to be no more than once per decade.
I think the karma system generally does a standup job of promoting the good stuff to my attention and occasionally punishing (with a negative score) stuff that’s bad. I do think there are worries about short term incentives and scoring, and I’d like to remedy that in part by creating better long-term incentives. I’m just about to get back to work on the book of the LW 2018 Review, to set things in motion for us to output a book like that annually. The combination of Review+Book I hope will feel to authors much more valuable+rewarding than week-to-week karma scores.
Related: do mods consider karma when deciding what to curate? Obviously something in the negatives is unlikely to warrant curation, but is a higher karma score considered a positive signal past whatever minimum bar?
(Speaking for my own internal reward function, I like writing posts that get high karma, but I’d like writing a post that gets curated much more)
Speaking for myself, when I consider what post to curate, I let my attention naturally go to the top 5 or so recent high karma posts, as well as to the posts that other mods nominated (we have a mod-only UI that shows all curation nominations). I also ask myself what posts I liked lately, and occasionally when I read a post I immediately think “wow this was excellent, I bet I’ll want to curate this 5 days from now” and nominate it. For example, this happened with a post recently, where I wrote a comment about why I liked the post as soon as I read it, and then still endorsed it 4 days later and curated it.
Overall karma plays an important role in what posts I consider. But to answer your specific question, about whether a higher karma score is something I consider a positive signal, the answer is no.
My rough internal question is “Was this idea important/interesting/useful enough, and was it written clearly/concisely/enjoyably enough?” and don’t care about the karma. That generally produces a binary “yes/no”.
The main way I use karma is to second-guess myself. If I think a post should be curated, but it only got like 35 karma, then I will spend some time considering the hypothesis that “This post is really well aimed at Ben in particular, and actually a lot of people won’t be that interested to read this.”
I would like to add that I find politics important and found the pandemic posts mostly very useful and readable. But writing politics requires strong self-discipline if a rationalist standard of discussion should be maintained, in particular by readers who vote.