@habryka this comment has an anomalous amount of karma. It showed up on popular comments, I think, and I’m wondering if people liked the comment when they saw it there which lead to a feedback loop of more eyeballs on the comment, more likes, more eyeball etc. If so, is that the intended behaviour of the popular comments feature? It seems like it shouldn’t be.
Yeah, seems like a kinda bad feedback loop. It doesn’t seem to usually happen in that the comments I’ve seen upvoted in that section usually don’t get this extremely many upvotes on a comment this short.
I don’t have a great solution. We could do something that’s more clever and algorithmic, which doesn’t seem crazy but I am also hesitant to do because it’s a lot of work and also I like more straightforward and simple algorithms for transparency reasons.
IDK, I think this comment warrants the level of karma. OP is proposing messing around with a drug class that kills thousands of people per year. Even only counting benzo overdoses that don’t involve opioids, it kills ~1500 people per year. Source: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates (you can download the data from that page to see precise numbers).
It’s not often that a forum comment could save a life!
Even though I think the comment was useful, it doesn’t look to me like it was as useful as the typical 139 karma comment as I expect LW readers to be fairly unlikely to start popping benzos after reading this post. IMO it should’ve gotten like 30-40 karma. Even 60 wouldn’t have been too shocking to me. But 139? That’s way more karma than anything else I’ve posted.
I don’t think it warrants this much karma, and I now share @ryan_greenblatt’s concerns about the ability to vote on Quick Takes and Popular Comments introducing algorithmic virality to LW. That sort of thing is typically corrosive to epistemic hygeine as it changes the incentives of commenting more towards posting applause-lights. I don’t think that’s a good change for LW, as I think we’ve got too much group-think as it is.
The comment being referenced may be of a very rare type. I have never been on Lesswrong, and rushed down to the comments section to type something, and found someone else having said it more eloquently than I wanted to. Normally we have a lot of entropy in the group thinking (which I love). This may just be a rare type of case.
@habryka this comment has an anomalous amount of karma. It showed up on popular comments, I think, and I’m wondering if people liked the comment when they saw it there which lead to a feedback loop of more eyeballs on the comment, more likes, more eyeball etc. If so, is that the intended behaviour of the popular comments feature? It seems like it shouldn’t be.
See also discussion here.
Yeah, seems like a kinda bad feedback loop. It doesn’t seem to usually happen in that the comments I’ve seen upvoted in that section usually don’t get this extremely many upvotes on a comment this short.
I don’t have a great solution. We could do something that’s more clever and algorithmic, which doesn’t seem crazy but I am also hesitant to do because it’s a lot of work and also I like more straightforward and simple algorithms for transparency reasons.
IDK, I think this comment warrants the level of karma. OP is proposing messing around with a drug class that kills thousands of people per year. Even only counting benzo overdoses that don’t involve opioids, it kills ~1500 people per year. Source: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates (you can download the data from that page to see precise numbers).
It’s not often that a forum comment could save a life!
Even though I think the comment was useful, it doesn’t look to me like it was as useful as the typical 139 karma comment as I expect LW readers to be fairly unlikely to start popping benzos after reading this post. IMO it should’ve gotten like 30-40 karma. Even 60 wouldn’t have been too shocking to me. But 139? That’s way more karma than anything else I’ve posted.
I don’t think it warrants this much karma, and I now share @ryan_greenblatt’s concerns about the ability to vote on Quick Takes and Popular Comments introducing algorithmic virality to LW. That sort of thing is typically corrosive to epistemic hygeine as it changes the incentives of commenting more towards posting applause-lights. I don’t think that’s a good change for LW, as I think we’ve got too much group-think as it is.
Yeah, seems right to me. If this is a recurring thing we might deactivate voting on the popular comments interface or something like that.
Here’s a quick mockup of what that might look like.
In my head you the voting UI is available after you click to expand and then scroll down to the bottom of the comment.
Added: Oops, I realize I did the quick takes, not the popular comments. Still, the relevant changes are very similar.
The comment being referenced may be of a very rare type. I have never been on Lesswrong, and rushed down to the comments section to type something, and found someone else having said it more eloquently than I wanted to. Normally we have a lot of entropy in the group thinking (which I love). This may just be a rare type of case.