I think it’s more of an effect of making them a limited resource at all than an effect of making them a resource that’s correlated with being approved of by a high-karma LWer.
Making upvotes a limited resource means that there will be fewer upvotes in total, and slower karma gains, and thus each point of karma that one gets will be more meaningful, and a stronger incentive to ‘do more like that’.
Kind of like how if you have an income of $10,000/week, $1 doesn’t mean much, but if your income is more along the lines of $500/week, $1 is much more significant.
There’s precedent for making changes with this effect. It used to be that you could vote on (and would automatically vote up) your own comments, and those points did not evaporate when new comments started to appear at 0 karma without the option for the poster to vote on them.
Fair enough. If a change in the karma system was worth doing, this issue is unlikely to tip things back in the other direction: it would have to be really borderline.
Which is why my proposal isn’t necessarily linked to Karma Score. You can just give everyone the same number of votes.
I think it’s more of an effect of making them a limited resource at all than an effect of making them a resource that’s correlated with being approved of by a high-karma LWer.
I don’t follow. How does making upvotes a limited resource make karma more strongly desired?
In exactly that way.
Abundant things are not valued. Scarce things are, or may be. This is why gold is usable as currency and rocks are not.
Making upvotes a limited resource means that there will be fewer upvotes in total, and slower karma gains, and thus each point of karma that one gets will be more meaningful, and a stronger incentive to ‘do more like that’.
Kind of like how if you have an income of $10,000/week, $1 doesn’t mean much, but if your income is more along the lines of $500/week, $1 is much more significant.
It would also skew total karma scores to users who posted heavily before the change.
There’s precedent for making changes with this effect. It used to be that you could vote on (and would automatically vote up) your own comments, and those points did not evaporate when new comments started to appear at 0 karma without the option for the poster to vote on them.
Fair enough. If a change in the karma system was worth doing, this issue is unlikely to tip things back in the other direction: it would have to be really borderline.
True.
Agreed. I shouldn’t have elaborated so much on implementation.