I actually like the inflation quite a bit. A major part of why I didn’t feel that the original lesswrong was worth interacting with was that I didn’t feel like I would get large enough rewards from posting something epistemically valuable; higher-karma users being able to give and take more approval makes it feel more like my voice mattered to someone who I should care about. I do like the idea of being able to see +/- votes, because then you see ratio, but I definitely love the karma inflation.
On reddit, I get one point when I post a comment; getting downvoted puts me at 0 points, and so I wouldn’t want to send the signal that I got downvoted by un-upvoting my own post. This might be an argument for not upvoting one’s own posts by default, but if that’s the case, I would want “0 points” to be replaced with “no votes” if there aren’t any.
I also think karma should be kept under anti-goodhart treatment: it should have humans who have the option of totally changing the algorithm monitoring it for value alignment. Karma will be an optimization target for many users (attempted to make bet, too hard to specify), and displaying it seems important for keeping users who want social approval for their thinking coming back. On facebook, I have to get social approval by being funny; my hope is that lesswrong can be a place that I can get social approval for being epistemically useful. (In general, I don’t think I’ll care to interact with it if I don’t get social approval points back for it.)
I actually like the inflation quite a bit. A major part of why I didn’t feel that the original lesswrong was worth interacting with was that I didn’t feel like I would get large enough rewards from posting something epistemically valuable; higher-karma users being able to give and take more approval makes it feel more like my voice mattered to someone who I should care about. I do like the idea of being able to see +/- votes, because then you see ratio, but I definitely love the karma inflation.
On reddit, I get one point when I post a comment; getting downvoted puts me at 0 points, and so I wouldn’t want to send the signal that I got downvoted by un-upvoting my own post. This might be an argument for not upvoting one’s own posts by default, but if that’s the case, I would want “0 points” to be replaced with “no votes” if there aren’t any.
I also think karma should be kept under anti-goodhart treatment: it should have humans who have the option of totally changing the algorithm monitoring it for value alignment. Karma will be an optimization target for many users (attempted to make bet, too hard to specify), and displaying it seems important for keeping users who want social approval for their thinking coming back. On facebook, I have to get social approval by being funny; my hope is that lesswrong can be a place that I can get social approval for being epistemically useful. (In general, I don’t think I’ll care to interact with it if I don’t get social approval points back for it.)
Opposite preference here: I would very much like have the option to not see my own karma scores, or votes on anything that I post.
Upvoted among other things for attempting to operationalize a belief so it could be bet on.
update: no longer think I like vote inflation. I would have lost the virtual bet against Zvi.
Did something happen to change your opinion?
Noticed that, as [edit: Raymond, not Zvi] predicted, I started counting 3 as 1.