A consequence of voting unconditionally is that you’ll contribute to comments being higher than you think they deserve. All scoring rules have tradeoffs.
I think I disagree with the idea that a comment deserves a specific number of votes.
Comment karma is “the number of people who liked it, and cared enough to click the button, minus the number of people who disliked it, and cared enough to click the button”.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five? Downvoting a comment strategically is like saying “this is a nice comment, but it doesn’t deserve more than five people to like it; and because six people said they like it, I am saying that I dislike it, just so that it gets the result it deserves”.
It might be worth a poll to find out whether people think posts “deserve” a certain number (or number in a small range) of comments.
I’m not sure that sort of voting makes sense, but I do a little of it myself. I’m guessing that “justice” based voting stabilizes the value of karma, and otherwise it would take increasingly high numbers of votes to indicate that a post is unusually good.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five?
It actually doesn’t mean anything if there’s only one comment. But the way LW works is that if there’s one comment with 5, and another with 6, the one with 6 gets displayed first and read by more people.
I think your scoring rules makes more sense in a binary “vote yes or no” democracy. If you’re trying to decide whether you should or shouldn’t enact a policy, and if there are more negative than positive votes then the policy is enacted, you should yes vote if you agree with the policy and no if you disagree.
But in a meritocratic system like LW, where individual posts are ranked against each other based on score, this results in “pretty good comments” getting ranked the same level as “really good comments”.
A consequence of voting unconditionally is that you’ll contribute to comments being higher than you think they deserve. All scoring rules have tradeoffs.
I think I disagree with the idea that a comment deserves a specific number of votes.
Comment karma is “the number of people who liked it, and cared enough to click the button, minus the number of people who disliked it, and cared enough to click the button”.
What does it mean to say that a comment deserves that the result should be e.g. five? Downvoting a comment strategically is like saying “this is a nice comment, but it doesn’t deserve more than five people to like it; and because six people said they like it, I am saying that I dislike it, just so that it gets the result it deserves”.
It might be worth a poll to find out whether people think posts “deserve” a certain number (or number in a small range) of comments.
I’m not sure that sort of voting makes sense, but I do a little of it myself. I’m guessing that “justice” based voting stabilizes the value of karma, and otherwise it would take increasingly high numbers of votes to indicate that a post is unusually good.
It actually doesn’t mean anything if there’s only one comment. But the way LW works is that if there’s one comment with 5, and another with 6, the one with 6 gets displayed first and read by more people.
I think your scoring rules makes more sense in a binary “vote yes or no” democracy. If you’re trying to decide whether you should or shouldn’t enact a policy, and if there are more negative than positive votes then the policy is enacted, you should yes vote if you agree with the policy and no if you disagree.
But in a meritocratic system like LW, where individual posts are ranked against each other based on score, this results in “pretty good comments” getting ranked the same level as “really good comments”.