The content that started the chain was a post, rather than comments to a post; I linked to the comment chain by another poster that quoted the particular relevant sections, for simplicity and clarity.
Honestly, the content of the text I don’t think I’d like to see even as a comment in the Main section—it’s basically a burst of preaching to the crowd, except the crowd here won’t even know most of the point—but Karma only controls the content of posts in the Main section and is thus most relevant in that context.
I don’t consider the comment section useful or relevant in any way. I can see voting on articles being useful, with articles scoring high enough being shifted into discussion automatically. You could even have a second tier of voting for when a post has enough votes to pass the threshold into Main for the votes it gets once there.
The main problem with karma sorting is that the people that actually control things are the ones that read through all content, indiscriminately. Either all of LessWrong does this, making karma pointless, or a sufficiently dedicated agent could effectively control LessWrong’s perception of how other rationalists feel.
I’m sorting by Controversial for this thread to see what LessWrong is actually split about.
Mechanically, I’m not sure how you’d handle automatically upvoting articles into Discussion: people do that by hand often, but they have to do it by hand because most contents lose usefulness and sometimes even readability when pulled from context.
((At a deeper level, it’s quite easy to imagine or select posts that belong in Discussion or solely as comment and will quickly get high Karma values, and just as easy to think of posts that belong in Main but shouldn’t have anything that would make folk upvote them to start with.))
The main problem with karma sorting is that the people that actually control things are the ones that read through all content, indiscriminately.
At least at this point, it’s easy enough (and often necessary enough) to change Sorting regularly just to find an article more than once, so I’m not sure sorting is the most meaningful part of Karma. The ability to prevent posters from regularly creating Main articles seems more relevant, and a number of folk at least treat Main articles more seriously.
The content that started the chain was a post, rather than comments to a post; I linked to the comment chain by another poster that quoted the particular relevant sections, for simplicity and clarity.
Honestly, the content of the text I don’t think I’d like to see even as a comment in the Main section—it’s basically a burst of preaching to the crowd, except the crowd here won’t even know most of the point—but Karma only controls the content of posts in the Main section and is thus most relevant in that context.
I don’t consider the comment section useful or relevant in any way. I can see voting on articles being useful, with articles scoring high enough being shifted into discussion automatically. You could even have a second tier of voting for when a post has enough votes to pass the threshold into Main for the votes it gets once there.
The main problem with karma sorting is that the people that actually control things are the ones that read through all content, indiscriminately. Either all of LessWrong does this, making karma pointless, or a sufficiently dedicated agent could effectively control LessWrong’s perception of how other rationalists feel.
I’m sorting by Controversial for this thread to see what LessWrong is actually split about.
In this case, the content was already in a post.
Mechanically, I’m not sure how you’d handle automatically upvoting articles into Discussion: people do that by hand often, but they have to do it by hand because most contents lose usefulness and sometimes even readability when pulled from context.
((At a deeper level, it’s quite easy to imagine or select posts that belong in Discussion or solely as comment and will quickly get high Karma values, and just as easy to think of posts that belong in Main but shouldn’t have anything that would make folk upvote them to start with.))
At least at this point, it’s easy enough (and often necessary enough) to change Sorting regularly just to find an article more than once, so I’m not sure sorting is the most meaningful part of Karma. The ability to prevent posters from regularly creating Main articles seems more relevant, and a number of folk at least treat Main articles more seriously.