I know how to farm karma on here, I just mostly choose not to, but when I post things that are of the type that I expect them to be voted up I can be pretty lazy and people will vote it up because I hit the applause light for something they already wanted to applaud. If I post something that I know people will disagree with because it goes against standard takes, I’ve got to be way more detailed.
One thing I’ve been thinking about in this regard is the microhabits around voting.
I only vote on a small minority of the stuff I read. I assume others are similar.
And voting is a bit of a cognitive chore: There are 25 possible ways to vote: strong down/weak down/nothing/weak up/strong up, on the 2 different axes.
I wish I had a principled way of choosing between those 25 different ways to vote, but I don’t. I rarely feel satisfied with the choice I made. I’m definitely inconsistent in my behavior from comment to comment.
For example, if someone makes a point that I might have made myself, is it OK to upvote them overall, or should I just vote to agree? I appreciate them making the point, so I usually give them an upvote for overall—after all, if I made the point myself, I’d automatically give myself an “overall” upvote too. But now that I explicitly consider, maybe my threshold should be higher, e.g. only upvote “overall” if I think they made the point at least as well as I would’ve made it.
In any case, the “point I would’ve made myself” situation is one of a fairly small number of scenarios where I get enough activation energy to actually vote on something.
Sometimes I wonder what LW would be like if a user was only allowed to vote on a random 5% subset of the comments on any given page. (To make it deterministic, you could hand out vote privilege based on the hash of their user ID and the comment ID.) Then nudge users to actually vote on those 5%, or explicitly acknowledge a null vote. I wonder if this would create more of a “jury trial” sort of feel, compared to the current system which can have a “count the size of various tribes” feel.
One thing I’ve been thinking about in this regard is the microhabits around voting.
I only vote on a small minority of the stuff I read. I assume others are similar.
And voting is a bit of a cognitive chore: There are 25 possible ways to vote: strong down/weak down/nothing/weak up/strong up, on the 2 different axes.
I wish I had a principled way of choosing between those 25 different ways to vote, but I don’t. I rarely feel satisfied with the choice I made. I’m definitely inconsistent in my behavior from comment to comment.
For example, if someone makes a point that I might have made myself, is it OK to upvote them overall, or should I just vote to agree? I appreciate them making the point, so I usually give them an upvote for overall—after all, if I made the point myself, I’d automatically give myself an “overall” upvote too. But now that I explicitly consider, maybe my threshold should be higher, e.g. only upvote “overall” if I think they made the point at least as well as I would’ve made it.
In any case, the “point I would’ve made myself” situation is one of a fairly small number of scenarios where I get enough activation energy to actually vote on something.
Sometimes I wonder what LW would be like if a user was only allowed to vote on a random 5% subset of the comments on any given page. (To make it deterministic, you could hand out vote privilege based on the hash of their user ID and the comment ID.) Then nudge users to actually vote on those 5%, or explicitly acknowledge a null vote. I wonder if this would create more of a “jury trial” sort of feel, compared to the current system which can have a “count the size of various tribes” feel.