Advice for journalists was a bit more polemic which I think naturally leads to more engagement. But I’d like to say that I strongly upvoted the mapping discussions post and played around with the site quite a bit when it was first posted—it’s really valuable to me.
Karma’s a bit of a blunt tool—yes I think it’s good to have posts with broad appeal but some posts are going to be comparatively more useful to a smaller group of people, and that’s OK too.
I think we should put less faith in the karma system on this site as a ranking system. I agree ranking systems are good to have, but I think short-term upvotes by readers with feedback winner-takes-most mechanisms is inherently ill-suited to this.
If we want a better ranking system, I think we’d need something like a set of voting options at the bottom of the post like:
does this seem to have enduring value?
is this a technical post which reports on a substantial amount of work done?
would I recommend that a researcher in the field this post is in familiarize themself with this post?
and then also a score based on citations, as is done with academia.
Karma, as it stands, is something more like someone wandering by a poster and saying ‘nice!’. LessWrong is a weird inbetween zone with aspects of both social media and academic publishing.
Advice for journalists was a bit more polemic which I think naturally leads to more engagement. But I’d like to say that I strongly upvoted the mapping discussions post and played around with the site quite a bit when it was first posted—it’s really valuable to me.
Karma’s a bit of a blunt tool—yes I think it’s good to have posts with broad appeal but some posts are going to be comparatively more useful to a smaller group of people, and that’s OK too.
Sure but shouldn’t the karma system be a prioritisation ranking, not just “what is fun to read?”
I think we should put less faith in the karma system on this site as a ranking system. I agree ranking systems are good to have, but I think short-term upvotes by readers with feedback winner-takes-most mechanisms is inherently ill-suited to this.
If we want a better ranking system, I think we’d need something like a set of voting options at the bottom of the post like:
does this seem to have enduring value?
is this a technical post which reports on a substantial amount of work done?
would I recommend that a researcher in the field this post is in familiarize themself with this post?
and then also a score based on citations, as is done with academia.
Karma, as it stands, is something more like someone wandering by a poster and saying ‘nice!’. LessWrong is a weird inbetween zone with aspects of both social media and academic publishing.
But isn’t the point of karma to be a ranking system? Surely its bad if it’s a suboptimal one?