I have noticed that starting posts at the poster’s karma creates a double counting: I think “Raymond posted this I should read it” and also “This has 3 points I should read it” but it has 3 points because Raymond wrote it. I then notice that it causes me to want to know how many points Raymond gives his initial posts so I can mentally subtract those 3 points and see if anyone else actually endorses this comment, so now I feel low-level pressured to memorize people’s karma scores. Which seems bad.
A question I find myself asking is “do people write posts they themselves would not wish to upvote?” I think the answer is yes, e.g. Raymond’s “good point, I will fix that” which is a good comment for him to write but which I do not think he would choose to upvote.
I do think that the sorting effect of attaching the person’s karma to the comment is actively good and would like to keep it. That could be kept distinct from the displayed score, same way it is kept distinct from the person’s karma score.
I also realize that I have a lot of strong preferences in such things, so we might want to consider (non-urgently) putting effort into giving people customization options for display of scores and sorting of comments.
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 think the intent might actually be that the karma for a given comment isn’t displayed that prominently (i.e. a faint grey number buried in a string of numbers of icons). And that the idea is for most of the work being done by the sorting rather than by expecting people to read karma-count.
(although this is the case for comments, less so for posts)
This seems like another reason to display net upvotes on the page (in an easier-to-read font), and hide karma weighting behind a thing you have to click/hover to view. Net upvoters matter less than karma, so you’re giving boring information in an easy-on-the-eyes fashion, rather than giving interesting information in a hard-to-see fashion.
I noticed this. This seems to belong to a class where if you’re going to ignore the karma number and trust the sorting, being hard to see is good, but if you’re going to squint and look at it anyway, then making it hard to see is just a tax on eyes. I need to live with it for longer before saying for sure but I worry that this catches us in the bad middle. Can we actually avoid looking at all? So far my answer is no, I can’t.
I have noticed that starting posts at the poster’s karma creates a double counting: I think “Raymond posted this I should read it” and also “This has 3 points I should read it” but it has 3 points because Raymond wrote it. I then notice that it causes me to want to know how many points Raymond gives his initial posts so I can mentally subtract those 3 points and see if anyone else actually endorses this comment, so now I feel low-level pressured to memorize people’s karma scores. Which seems bad.
A question I find myself asking is “do people write posts they themselves would not wish to upvote?” I think the answer is yes, e.g. Raymond’s “good point, I will fix that” which is a good comment for him to write but which I do not think he would choose to upvote.
I do think that the sorting effect of attaching the person’s karma to the comment is actively good and would like to keep it. That could be kept distinct from the displayed score, same way it is kept distinct from the person’s karma score.
I also realize that I have a lot of strong preferences in such things, so we might want to consider (non-urgently) putting effort into giving people customization options for display of scores and sorting of comments.
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.
You can remove the upvote from your own comment or even downvote it.
I think the intent might actually be that the karma for a given comment isn’t displayed that prominently (i.e. a faint grey number buried in a string of numbers of icons). And that the idea is for most of the work being done by the sorting rather than by expecting people to read karma-count.
(although this is the case for comments, less so for posts)
This seems like another reason to display net upvotes on the page (in an easier-to-read font), and hide karma weighting behind a thing you have to click/hover to view. Net upvoters matter less than karma, so you’re giving boring information in an easy-on-the-eyes fashion, rather than giving interesting information in a hard-to-see fashion.
I noticed this. This seems to belong to a class where if you’re going to ignore the karma number and trust the sorting, being hard to see is good, but if you’re going to squint and look at it anyway, then making it hard to see is just a tax on eyes. I need to live with it for longer before saying for sure but I worry that this catches us in the bad middle. Can we actually avoid looking at all? So far my answer is no, I can’t.