I think the relative weighting is good and if anything is too weak, and I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all. This seems fine since 5 Karma is one good comment, and the system can put your vote in retroactively. If anything it sends the right message that we want to know your opinion but do not yet put any weight on it! During the beta this might have odd effects since it does not appear that Karma has transferred from 1.0 (e.g. my posts on my first day here are starting at 1) so for now we should give everyone at least 1 point.
Inflation worries me a lot, though. As Raymond notes, when I see a 7 I instinctively think of that as 7 people voting up (or 7 more up than down). My brain knows what to think about that. If 20 is the new 7, then every time I see a number I’m doing math to translate back to the scale of people. This is together with the issue that comments start at 1+ rather than 0. The starting at 0 and going up slowly (since downvoting and stinginess) helped with the atmosphere and culture that LW1.0 projected. Each point mattered and getting them was hard and meaningful. It sent the message that one should be thoughtful (perhaps too thoughtful, but I am not worried about that error in 2.0 at least for now).
I find smaller numbers that map onto basic instincts, where I know what 1 means, much better and enabling of discrete, clean thinking than larger numbers. I despise the ‘Over 9000’ thing, and really appreciate Dragon Quest’s starting you out dealing 4 damage and maxing out at 99 versus Final Fantasy starting you out dealing 121 and maxing out at 9999. Too much precision! Too many significant figures! I get that a Reddit post having 2730 upvotes actually got upvoted that many times but what does that even mean beyond going viral? How do I think about that?
Thus I think we should consider normalizing the scale, at least such that when you see a 10, on average it means 10 people voted up. If we get more people maybe even normalize such that the scale maxes out at 1 rather than starting at 1. We might even think about displaying on a log scale (although we should not do the actual long-term calculation that way, that would be quite bad).
Display number of upvotes, use karma only for sorting
This would let the visual-indicator tell us the most concrete thing about a post, while getting most of the benefits of the karma-as-sorting-mechanism, without having to figure out a karma-scale that was human-readable-yet-also-accurate.
Hmm. The main disadvantage I see of this is that it then makes it harder (or at least somewhat more confusing) to implement the “incremental upvote” thing (where you can upvote something up to a number of times equal to your karma)
Bonus suggestion: Reinterpret “∧” and “∨” as meaning “increase the amount of karma I give this post/comment” and “decrease it”, respectively, not as meaning “upvote” and “downvote” per se. So e.g. if you find a new comment and click ∧ once, that gives +1 karma; if you click ∧ a second time, then if your user karma is high enough, it goes up to +2 karma; etc. This means that clicking ∧ once followed by ∨ once results in 0, not in −1; this is the method for removing your vote entirely.
Giving <0 karma to something counts as a “downvote”; giving >0 karma counts as an “upvote”; giving 0 counts as not voting.
If you click and hold on the ∧ or ∨, a scale appears and you can drag the karma weighting of your vote along a -n to +n bar, where moving it to 0 will remove your vote.
There’s a clear visual animation that pops up when you click the ∧ or ∨ and successfully increase someone’s karma, whereas an inconspicuous “nothing happened!” bubble pops up if you try to up or down something past the point where you’re allowed to allocate that much karma or negkarma.
Suggestion: replace “n points” with “n votes,” displaying the net number of upvotes a post/comment has received. Hovering your mouse over “n votes” shows the number of upvotes, the number of downvotes, and the net karma gained. E.g., you might find a comment low on the listing that says “+6 votes”, hover your mouse over that text, and have this display:
8 upvotes
2 downvotes
+7 karma
(Representing, say, downvotes valued at −5 and −2, and upvotes valued at +1, +1, +1, +1, +2, +2, +2, +4. It’s not obvious to me that it’s good or necessary to make it clear this is the breakdown, though.)
> I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all.
This is actually moderately harder to implement in a way that makes sense. If you set the initial thing to 0, people get confused about whether the buttons are working (it just looks like a bug, or if you make it explicit that it doesn’t work because they are new, it’s a fairly offputting initial attempt to engage with the discussion)
One possibility is to let people upvote things, and see the upvote, but it doesn’t actually start weighting things for other people until they’ve gotten at least 5 karma. This might be better but is more work to implement.
Another possibility (with some added work) is to not display the voting buttons at all until someone has 5 karma. Hacker News does this for downvotes, I believe.
My worry on letting their upvote only appear for them is that it’s dishonest, in addition to any coding issues.
I agree that the button doing nothing visible seems bad, so we’d want to have some other visual indicator that it worked, such as displaying number of upvotes somewhere—they’d still count for that.
I agree with this. I also think that needing to get 5 karma before voting isn’t that discouraging, and the kinds of users it discourages (ones who are too impatient to want to hang out and read stuff before they get to influence where things go; ones who will just lurk forever no matter what; ones who are unusually easily discouraged or unambitious...) might be outweighed by the kinds of users it encourages to comment who otherwise would just lurk. Particularly if the voting requirement is some low, obviously reachable karma level, I could imagine it feeling like a tantalizing prize that would make me want to start commenting.
Also, keeping brand-new users from voting would have some advantages for limiting sockpuppet shenanigans, ‘we just got linked from the front page of reddit’ mayhem, and the like.
Strong endorsement of the principle that not every potential user is a net positive, and driving away potential new users is not automatically bad. Maximizing views/users/etc too much is a classic trap metric.
I think that principle would apply to ‘leaves because they couldn’t vote without 5 karma’ but could be convinced otherwise by people worth keeping saying ‘this would drive me away if I were new.’
This did drive me away from both stackoverflow and lesswrong for a long time, and what finally made me feel able to interact with them is learning that it is possible to make good posts and get karma. I think it’s a reasonable restriction, and that it creates a problem that is likely best solved another way.
Huh—making sure I get this: you were driven away by inability to upvote, but you think it is probably still better to have that restriction and find some other way to reassure people they can get karma and participate?
Assuming I understand you correctly this is a stronger-than-average endorsement of the karma restriction.
StackExchange also has a minimum reputation requirement for votes to count. When you try to vote on something it displays a box saying the vote was recorded but doesn’t change the publicly displayed vote count.
What I don’t like about the way it is implemented on StackExchange is that it seems it’s not possible to take back a vote until you have enough reputation to vote at all.
Besides protecting the vote count from being distorted by newcomers, I think the main advantage is that it makes it much harder to farm a bunch of karma with sockpuppet accounts.
I think the relative weighting is good and if anything is too weak, and I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all. This seems fine since 5 Karma is one good comment, and the system can put your vote in retroactively. If anything it sends the right message that we want to know your opinion but do not yet put any weight on it! During the beta this might have odd effects since it does not appear that Karma has transferred from 1.0 (e.g. my posts on my first day here are starting at 1) so for now we should give everyone at least 1 point.
Inflation worries me a lot, though. As Raymond notes, when I see a 7 I instinctively think of that as 7 people voting up (or 7 more up than down). My brain knows what to think about that. If 20 is the new 7, then every time I see a number I’m doing math to translate back to the scale of people. This is together with the issue that comments start at 1+ rather than 0. The starting at 0 and going up slowly (since downvoting and stinginess) helped with the atmosphere and culture that LW1.0 projected. Each point mattered and getting them was hard and meaningful. It sent the message that one should be thoughtful (perhaps too thoughtful, but I am not worried about that error in 2.0 at least for now).
I find smaller numbers that map onto basic instincts, where I know what 1 means, much better and enabling of discrete, clean thinking than larger numbers. I despise the ‘Over 9000’ thing, and really appreciate Dragon Quest’s starting you out dealing 4 damage and maxing out at 99 versus Final Fantasy starting you out dealing 121 and maxing out at 9999. Too much precision! Too many significant figures! I get that a Reddit post having 2730 upvotes actually got upvoted that many times but what does that even mean beyond going viral? How do I think about that?
Thus I think we should consider normalizing the scale, at least such that when you see a 10, on average it means 10 people voted up. If we get more people maybe even normalize such that the scale maxes out at 1 rather than starting at 1. We might even think about displaying on a log scale (although we should not do the actual long-term calculation that way, that would be quite bad).
Hmm. Reading this I think pushes me towards:
Display number of upvotes, use karma only for sorting
This would let the visual-indicator tell us the most concrete thing about a post, while getting most of the benefits of the karma-as-sorting-mechanism, without having to figure out a karma-scale that was human-readable-yet-also-accurate.
Hmm. The main disadvantage I see of this is that it then makes it harder (or at least somewhat more confusing) to implement the “incremental upvote” thing (where you can upvote something up to a number of times equal to your karma)
Bonus suggestion: Reinterpret “∧” and “∨” as meaning “increase the amount of karma I give this post/comment” and “decrease it”, respectively, not as meaning “upvote” and “downvote” per se. So e.g. if you find a new comment and click ∧ once, that gives +1 karma; if you click ∧ a second time, then if your user karma is high enough, it goes up to +2 karma; etc. This means that clicking ∧ once followed by ∨ once results in 0, not in −1; this is the method for removing your vote entirely.
Giving <0 karma to something counts as a “downvote”; giving >0 karma counts as an “upvote”; giving 0 counts as not voting.
If you click and hold on the ∧ or ∨, a scale appears and you can drag the karma weighting of your vote along a -n to +n bar, where moving it to 0 will remove your vote.
There’s a clear visual animation that pops up when you click the ∧ or ∨ and successfully increase someone’s karma, whereas an inconspicuous “nothing happened!” bubble pops up if you try to up or down something past the point where you’re allowed to allocate that much karma or negkarma.
Suggestion: replace “n points” with “n votes,” displaying the net number of upvotes a post/comment has received. Hovering your mouse over “n votes” shows the number of upvotes, the number of downvotes, and the net karma gained. E.g., you might find a comment low on the listing that says “+6 votes”, hover your mouse over that text, and have this display:
8 upvotes
2 downvotes
+7 karma
(Representing, say, downvotes valued at −5 and −2, and upvotes valued at +1, +1, +1, +1, +2, +2, +2, +4. It’s not obvious to me that it’s good or necessary to make it clear this is the breakdown, though.)
> I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all.
This is actually moderately harder to implement in a way that makes sense. If you set the initial thing to 0, people get confused about whether the buttons are working (it just looks like a bug, or if you make it explicit that it doesn’t work because they are new, it’s a fairly offputting initial attempt to engage with the discussion)
One possibility is to let people upvote things, and see the upvote, but it doesn’t actually start weighting things for other people until they’ve gotten at least 5 karma. This might be better but is more work to implement.
Another possibility (with some added work) is to not display the voting buttons at all until someone has 5 karma. Hacker News does this for downvotes, I believe.
My worry on letting their upvote only appear for them is that it’s dishonest, in addition to any coding issues.
I agree that the button doing nothing visible seems bad, so we’d want to have some other visual indicator that it worked, such as displaying number of upvotes somewhere—they’d still count for that.
I agree with this. I also think that needing to get 5 karma before voting isn’t that discouraging, and the kinds of users it discourages (ones who are too impatient to want to hang out and read stuff before they get to influence where things go; ones who will just lurk forever no matter what; ones who are unusually easily discouraged or unambitious...) might be outweighed by the kinds of users it encourages to comment who otherwise would just lurk. Particularly if the voting requirement is some low, obviously reachable karma level, I could imagine it feeling like a tantalizing prize that would make me want to start commenting.
Also, keeping brand-new users from voting would have some advantages for limiting sockpuppet shenanigans, ‘we just got linked from the front page of reddit’ mayhem, and the like.
Strong endorsement of the principle that not every potential user is a net positive, and driving away potential new users is not automatically bad. Maximizing views/users/etc too much is a classic trap metric.
I think that principle would apply to ‘leaves because they couldn’t vote without 5 karma’ but could be convinced otherwise by people worth keeping saying ‘this would drive me away if I were new.’
This did drive me away from both stackoverflow and lesswrong for a long time, and what finally made me feel able to interact with them is learning that it is possible to make good posts and get karma. I think it’s a reasonable restriction, and that it creates a problem that is likely best solved another way.
Huh—making sure I get this: you were driven away by inability to upvote, but you think it is probably still better to have that restriction and find some other way to reassure people they can get karma and participate?
Assuming I understand you correctly this is a stronger-than-average endorsement of the karma restriction.
StackExchange also has a minimum reputation requirement for votes to count. When you try to vote on something it displays a box saying the vote was recorded but doesn’t change the publicly displayed vote count.
What I don’t like about the way it is implemented on StackExchange is that it seems it’s not possible to take back a vote until you have enough reputation to vote at all.
Besides protecting the vote count from being distorted by newcomers, I think the main advantage is that it makes it much harder to farm a bunch of karma with sockpuppet accounts.