If one identity goes down in flames after a particularly unpopular posting, it doesn’t exhaust my “karma” capital.
One purpose of (significantly) negative (total) Karma is to indicate when a user should be kicked out. Limiting this damage damages the forum. (“A particularly unpopular posting” is not normally the issue, it’s usually the systematic failure to respond to negative feedback, including by stopping to post in particular modes or at all.)
One purpose of (significantly) negative (total) Karma is to indicate when a user should be kicked out.
I disagree, total karma should never be the sole indicator of whether a user should be kicked out. If a user is being obnoxious enough that kicking her out becomes a possibility, this will be quite evident from a cursory look at her post and comment log. I’m thinking of a LW user who would make a perfect example of this, except that I just can’t recall his or her name. Monkey(something), IIRC.
Total karma does have some useful technical effects, such as (AIUI) disabling downvotes and rate-limiting posts and comments.
Spite exists, and people do things out of spite. That doesn’t mean punishment shouldn’t exist. If you don’t stop being friends with anyone ever you will be abused and used and forced to spend time with awful people.
Total karma isn’t for you, it’s for everyone else.
Total karma isn’t for you, it’s for everyone else.
Producing correlated rather than independent judgments of post quality, with the well-known cascading effects. The “system” deliberately introduces what I call belief-opinion confusion
Intentionally or not you just described the karma system at fool.com (which they call recommendations). As a long time poster there it does have its uses: there are some extremely prolix boards where I skip through reading only the high rec posts, and don’t have to worry about being “shielded” from controversial ideas like you get with the system here.
If i were putting someone else’s karma system in here, I would put in stackexchange.com They have downvoting, but it costs the downvoter karma. So you don’t get things mindlessly downvoted just because they don’t kowtow. But actual low quality stuff is downvoted by high-karma individuals.
The recent improvement of showing pctage of downvotes here is nice. I think I would go the last step and “decorate” the up and down vote buttons with the total number of existing up and down votes. This would also be slightly more compact than the current system where I have points reported on top of comment, and then uninformative buttons below the post. And I would by scanning upvote totals be able to use recs in the way you want them used, if I wanted to ignore downvotes.
Users should never be kicked out. Downvotes shouldn’t exist.
The issues you are raising have been thoroughly aired here in the past. It isn’t helpful to barge in and propose rearranging the furniture just because you don’t see why it is the way it is. For some of the background I suggest this posting. There is certainly room for useful discussion of how LessWrong should be run, but it has to start from where it is.
Baring extreme scenarios, a system of upvotes should sort everything out.
Now. I’ve written the above on the hypothesis that you are not exactly what you call yourself, a troll. But the evidence is not favourable. You pre-emptively shot yourself in the foot by choosing that handle, posted a bio consisting of a list of what are hurrah keywords on LessWrong, accumulated some karma with innocuous postings, then started posting stuff that instantly gets downvoted out of sight.
If you are genuine, you need to change something. That is not something that I will say twice.
One purpose of (significantly) negative (total) Karma is to indicate when a user should be kicked out. Limiting this damage damages the forum. (“A particularly unpopular posting” is not normally the issue, it’s usually the systematic failure to respond to negative feedback, including by stopping to post in particular modes or at all.)
For example: I’ve made posts and comments that get massively downvoted but I have 2500 karma so I don’t get kicked out.
I disagree, total karma should never be the sole indicator of whether a user should be kicked out. If a user is being obnoxious enough that kicking her out becomes a possibility, this will be quite evident from a cursory look at her post and comment log. I’m thinking of a LW user who would make a perfect example of this, except that I just can’t recall his or her name. Monkey(something), IIRC.
Total karma does have some useful technical effects, such as (AIUI) disabling downvotes and rate-limiting posts and comments.
Some people might downvote everything another has ever said out of spite.
Some might gather a group of friends to downvote a comment they don’t like.
It’s like giving everyone a double vote.
We don’t kick people out of real life for disagreeing with us. (some do but no)
Users should never be kicked out. Downvotes shouldn’t exist. Baring extreme scenarios, a system of upvotes should sort everything out.
(hesitantly) And total karma shouldn’t exist. You should feel good for making a good comment, but not for making good comments in the past.
Spite exists, and people do things out of spite. That doesn’t mean punishment shouldn’t exist. If you don’t stop being friends with anyone ever you will be abused and used and forced to spend time with awful people.
Total karma isn’t for you, it’s for everyone else.
Producing correlated rather than independent judgments of post quality, with the well-known cascading effects. The “system” deliberately introduces what I call belief-opinion confusion
Intentionally or not you just described the karma system at fool.com (which they call recommendations). As a long time poster there it does have its uses: there are some extremely prolix boards where I skip through reading only the high rec posts, and don’t have to worry about being “shielded” from controversial ideas like you get with the system here.
If i were putting someone else’s karma system in here, I would put in stackexchange.com They have downvoting, but it costs the downvoter karma. So you don’t get things mindlessly downvoted just because they don’t kowtow. But actual low quality stuff is downvoted by high-karma individuals.
The recent improvement of showing pctage of downvotes here is nice. I think I would go the last step and “decorate” the up and down vote buttons with the total number of existing up and down votes. This would also be slightly more compact than the current system where I have points reported on top of comment, and then uninformative buttons below the post. And I would by scanning upvote totals be able to use recs in the way you want them used, if I wanted to ignore downvotes.
The issues you are raising have been thoroughly aired here in the past. It isn’t helpful to barge in and propose rearranging the furniture just because you don’t see why it is the way it is. For some of the background I suggest this posting. There is certainly room for useful discussion of how LessWrong should be run, but it has to start from where it is.
Right.
Which meaning of “should” is that?
Now. I’ve written the above on the hypothesis that you are not exactly what you call yourself, a troll. But the evidence is not favourable. You pre-emptively shot yourself in the foot by choosing that handle, posted a bio consisting of a list of what are hurrah keywords on LessWrong, accumulated some karma with innocuous postings, then started posting stuff that instantly gets downvoted out of sight.
If you are genuine, you need to change something. That is not something that I will say twice.