Downvotes (plus a mechanism for making heavily-downvoted things less prominent, which LW has) provide protection against spammers and trolls.
Downvotes provide a non-cluttering way of indicating when a particular kind of comment (e.g., low-value template-y attempts at humour, which if not discouraged are apt to start taking over everything) are not appreciated by the community.
Downvotes provide a signal to people who simply aren’t able or willing to make a positive contribution that they might do better to go elsewhere. Perhaps this last one is some of the motivation behind some or all mass-downvoting, but what evidence I have suggests that it’s often done to people whose contribution is obviously positive to anyone who isn’t so politicized that they see the mere presence of someone who thinks differently from them as a threat.
A less extreme modification of the karma system would be to keep the downvotes but change how karma is calculated for the users.
Karma could be defined as the sum of all votes of posts with positive total score.
An alternative change would be to count only the upvotes and ignore downvotes completely for the karma calculation.
In both cases the general correlation between users that post great content and high karma would stay intact but mass downvoting would no longer feel as threatening.
All the signaling benefits you mentioned would still work in this modified system.
Do you think these are acceptable changes to the karma system?
Doesn’t seem crazy. I’d have to give it more thought before deciding whether it’s likely to be an improvement. (Not that it particularly matters whether I think it’s likely to be an improvement!)
But mass-downvoting would still be an abuse of the system and make karma less informative. Better to make it go away, if possible, either by preventing it or by disincentivizing it.
[EDITED to add: I mean “and make the scores of posts and comments less informative”.]
I don’t think prevention is very likely as EYs comment suggests that moderator intervention will be very hard or even impossible, so disincentivizing is probably the way.
I hope my suggestions would remove a motivation for mass downvoting by making it impossible to attack someones karma.
Downvotes (plus a mechanism for making heavily-downvoted things less prominent, which LW has) provide protection against spammers and trolls.
Downvotes provide a non-cluttering way of indicating when a particular kind of comment (e.g., low-value template-y attempts at humour, which if not discouraged are apt to start taking over everything) are not appreciated by the community.
Downvotes provide a signal to people who simply aren’t able or willing to make a positive contribution that they might do better to go elsewhere. Perhaps this last one is some of the motivation behind some or all mass-downvoting, but what evidence I have suggests that it’s often done to people whose contribution is obviously positive to anyone who isn’t so politicized that they see the mere presence of someone who thinks differently from them as a threat.
A less extreme modification of the karma system would be to keep the downvotes but change how karma is calculated for the users.
Karma could be defined as the sum of all votes of posts with positive total score. An alternative change would be to count only the upvotes and ignore downvotes completely for the karma calculation.
In both cases the general correlation between users that post great content and high karma would stay intact but mass downvoting would no longer feel as threatening. All the signaling benefits you mentioned would still work in this modified system.
Do you think these are acceptable changes to the karma system?
Doesn’t seem crazy. I’d have to give it more thought before deciding whether it’s likely to be an improvement. (Not that it particularly matters whether I think it’s likely to be an improvement!)
But mass-downvoting would still be an abuse of the system and make karma less informative. Better to make it go away, if possible, either by preventing it or by disincentivizing it.
[EDITED to add: I mean “and make the scores of posts and comments less informative”.]
I don’t think prevention is very likely as EYs comment suggests that moderator intervention will be very hard or even impossible, so disincentivizing is probably the way. I hope my suggestions would remove a motivation for mass downvoting by making it impossible to attack someones karma.