I am not a fan of internet currency in all its forms generally because it draws attention away from the argument.
Reddit, which this is based on, went to disabling a subtractive karma rule for all submissions and comments. Submissions with down votes greater than up votes just don’t go anywhere while negative comment votes get buried similar to how they do here. That seems like a good way to organize the system.
Is the reason that it was implemented in order to be signaling for other users or is it just an artifact of the reddit API? Would disabling the actual display of the “points” simultaneously disable the comment ranking? What would be the most rational way to organize the comments. The least biased way would be for it to be based on time. The current way and the way reddit works is direct democracy and that of course is the tyranny of the majority. The current way may be the most efficient if the readers have such a high vale of their time that they only have time to read the most popular comments and skip the rest. However even if that is efficient it is not necessarily optimized to elucidate the best discussion points as users typically vote up things that they agree with rather than strong arguments.
I personally do not submit more responses and posts because of the karma system. As I have seen heavily on reddit, there is karma momentum where people tend to vote similar to how others have voted (as human nature would dictate). Based on that, I know that people will reference the total points of submitters and make decisions on how to take their comments and suggestions in light of that primed information—when the arguments should be evaluated independently.
I have no clever reply to most of your comment, but:
I personally do not submit more responses and posts because of the karma system.
In my case, it’s very much a motivating factor. In fact, I do not think I would have ever been led to comment or post at all without karma. I think this is primarily because I consider it exceptionally valuable, easy-to-read instant feedback on how I’m being received, which I’m normally bad at discerning and find a very important component of any sort of interaction. I virtually never comment on other blogs at all.
The only reason I look at a commenter or poster’s karma is when the post or comment seems tremendously bad, and I am trying to decide how much benefit of the doubt to give. In that case I mainly look to see if it’s significantly above zero, and don’t care beyond that.
I agree with the tone of your post. Voting doesn’t work very effectively, in all sorts of situations (e.g., Bush x2). I do kind of like the slashdot style system where maybe you can mark a post from a list of flags, e.g., insightful, funny, intelligent, etc, and perhaps add in a few negative or critical flags like (juvenile, trivial, poorly worded, etc.)
I think these changes would encourage a more holistic evaluation of responses and would work to avoid the overall gruffness, and over-priming effect related to the current system.
Edit: Even better, you could attach a +1 signifier to positive indications (intelligent, insightful, etc.), and a −1 signifier to negative indications (poorly worded, juvenile, etc.), and then enforce that whenever someone votes, they must include a flag. Then, when displaying total points, they should take the average over all categories, so that the only truly negative posts are those which are extremely dynamically poor, i.e., poor in every category.
I am not a fan of internet currency in all its forms generally because it draws attention away from the argument.
Reddit, which this is based on, went to disabling a subtractive karma rule for all submissions and comments. Submissions with down votes greater than up votes just don’t go anywhere while negative comment votes get buried similar to how they do here. That seems like a good way to organize the system.
Is the reason that it was implemented in order to be signaling for other users or is it just an artifact of the reddit API? Would disabling the actual display of the “points” simultaneously disable the comment ranking? What would be the most rational way to organize the comments. The least biased way would be for it to be based on time. The current way and the way reddit works is direct democracy and that of course is the tyranny of the majority. The current way may be the most efficient if the readers have such a high vale of their time that they only have time to read the most popular comments and skip the rest. However even if that is efficient it is not necessarily optimized to elucidate the best discussion points as users typically vote up things that they agree with rather than strong arguments.
I personally do not submit more responses and posts because of the karma system. As I have seen heavily on reddit, there is karma momentum where people tend to vote similar to how others have voted (as human nature would dictate). Based on that, I know that people will reference the total points of submitters and make decisions on how to take their comments and suggestions in light of that primed information—when the arguments should be evaluated independently.
Maybe I’m missing something though.
I have no clever reply to most of your comment, but:
In my case, it’s very much a motivating factor. In fact, I do not think I would have ever been led to comment or post at all without karma. I think this is primarily because I consider it exceptionally valuable, easy-to-read instant feedback on how I’m being received, which I’m normally bad at discerning and find a very important component of any sort of interaction. I virtually never comment on other blogs at all.
The only reason I look at a commenter or poster’s karma is when the post or comment seems tremendously bad, and I am trying to decide how much benefit of the doubt to give. In that case I mainly look to see if it’s significantly above zero, and don’t care beyond that.
I agree with the tone of your post. Voting doesn’t work very effectively, in all sorts of situations (e.g., Bush x2). I do kind of like the slashdot style system where maybe you can mark a post from a list of flags, e.g., insightful, funny, intelligent, etc, and perhaps add in a few negative or critical flags like (juvenile, trivial, poorly worded, etc.)
I think these changes would encourage a more holistic evaluation of responses and would work to avoid the overall gruffness, and over-priming effect related to the current system.
Edit: Even better, you could attach a +1 signifier to positive indications (intelligent, insightful, etc.), and a −1 signifier to negative indications (poorly worded, juvenile, etc.), and then enforce that whenever someone votes, they must include a flag. Then, when displaying total points, they should take the average over all categories, so that the only truly negative posts are those which are extremely dynamically poor, i.e., poor in every category.