I get the feeling that LW has a lot of lurkers with interesting things to say, but who are too afraid to say them. They may eventually build up the courage they need to contribute to the community, but this system would scare them off. They don’t yet have enough data to predict how well their posts would be received. We need to be doing the opposite and remove some of the barriers to joining in.
On the other hand, trolls don’t care that much about karma. They’ll just exploit sock puppets.
Yeah, LW would probably not be the place to try this. I would guess that most potential karma systems only truly function correctly with a sufficient population of users, a sufficient number of people reading each post. LW has atrophied too much for this.
The thing is that without downvotes, there aren’t actually that many barriers to joining in. If someone has a problem with something you say, they have to actually say so, instead of just downvoting, which is what often happens on Reddit. And I think this is better because it forces negative reward to be associated with feedback, so that people who either have misunderstandings or are poor articulators of their views can get better over time. The worst thing is getting downvoted without knowing why. I don’t know if this has been tried anywhere, but maybe a system where every vote would necessitate a comment would work better, so that why a remark was received a particular way by the community would be well understood.
I get the feeling that LW has a lot of lurkers with interesting things to say, but who are too afraid to say them. They may eventually build up the courage they need to contribute to the community, but this system would scare them off. They don’t yet have enough data to predict how well their posts would be received. We need to be doing the opposite and remove some of the barriers to joining in.
On the other hand, trolls don’t care that much about karma. They’ll just exploit sock puppets.
Yeah, LW would probably not be the place to try this. I would guess that most potential karma systems only truly function correctly with a sufficient population of users, a sufficient number of people reading each post. LW has atrophied too much for this.
I really like the idea, but agree that it is sadly not the right thing here. It would be a fun addition to an Arbital-like site.
The thing is that without downvotes, there aren’t actually that many barriers to joining in. If someone has a problem with something you say, they have to actually say so, instead of just downvoting, which is what often happens on Reddit. And I think this is better because it forces negative reward to be associated with feedback, so that people who either have misunderstandings or are poor articulators of their views can get better over time. The worst thing is getting downvoted without knowing why. I don’t know if this has been tried anywhere, but maybe a system where every vote would necessitate a comment would work better, so that why a remark was received a particular way by the community would be well understood.