We’ve talked in the past about making it so that if you have Karma Power 6, you can choose whether to give someone anywhere from 1-6 karma.
Upvoting
I think this is an okay solution, but I also think all meaningful upvotes basically cluster into two choices:
A. “I think this person just did a good thing I want to positively reinforce”
B. “I think this person did a thing important enough that everyone should pay attention to it.”
For A, I don’t think it obviously matters that you award more than 1 karma, and definitely never more than 3 karma. The karma should be mostly symbolic. For B, I’d almost always want to award them maximum karma. The choice of “well, do they really deserve 1, 2 or 3 karma for their pat-on-the-head?” doesn’t seem like a choice we should be forcing people to make.
The value in giving 1, 2 or 3 karma for a “small social reinforcement” is mostly about communicating “Social rewards from longtime trusted community members should feel better to get than social rewards from random newbies.” I’m not sure how strong a signal this is.
For “Pay Attention To This” upvotes, similarly, if you have 6 karma power, I don’t think it’s that interesting a choice to assign 4, 5 or 6.
So, I currently support a paradigm where you just have Big Upvote and Small Upvote. I’m neutral between “small upvote is always 1” or “small upvote grows from 1 to 3 as you gain karma
This feels elegant. The problem is downvoting.
Downvoting
When downvoting, there’s a few different things I might be wanting to do (note: I don’t endorse all of these, this is just what my S1 is wanting to do).
A. This person made a small mistake, and should be mildly socially punished
B. This person was deeply wrong and should heavily punished
C. This post is getting too much attention relative to how good it is. It’s at 25 karma. I want to try to bring to around 15 or something.
D. This content should not be on the site (for any one of a number reasons), should not show up on the frontpage (meaning the karma should be at most zero) or the comment should be autocollapsed (karma should be −5)
When a newcomer shows up and does something I don’t like, my natural instinct is to try to keep their comment at 0 (which feels like the right level of “your thing was bad”, but in a way that feels more like an awkward silence than a slap in the face. I definitely need to be able to downvote by less than 6. The problem is as a user gains karma power, the amount I need to downvote just scales linearly.
This is all incompatible with the simple “Big Vote, Small Vote” paradigm. Which feels sad from an elegance/symmetry perspective.
There’s another issue with voting, which is that I sometimes find a comment or post on the LW1 part of the site that I want to vote up or down, but I can’t because my 5 points of karma power would totally mess up the score of that comment/post in relation to its neighbors. I haven’t mentioned this before because I thought you might already have a plan to address that problem, or at worst I can wait until the variable upvote/downvote feature comes in. But if you didn’t have a specific plan for that and adopted “small upvote grows from 1 to 3 as you gain karma” then the problem wouldn’t get solved.
Also, is there an issue tracker for LW2? I wanted to check it to see if there’s an existing plan to address the above problem, but couldn’t find it through Google, from the About page, or by typing in “issue tracker” in the top right search box. There’s the old issue tracker at https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/issues but it doesn’t look like that’s being used anymore?
I liked the idea I think you mentioned in an earlier thread about this, where each click increases vote weight by one. It’s conceptually very simple, which I think is a good property for a UI. It does involve more clicks to apply more voting power, but that doesn’t seem bad to me. How often does one need to give something the maximum amount of votes, such that extra clicks are a problem? It seems to me this would tend to default to giving everyone the same voting power, but allow users with more karma to summon more voting power with very slightly more effort if they think it’s warranted. That feels right to me.
(A possible downside I see is that it might somehow do the opposite—that voting will feel like something that is reinforced in a conditioning sense, so that users with more voting power will get more reinforcers since they do click->reward more times, and that this will actually give them a habit of wanting to apply the maximum vote more than they otherwise would because it feels satisfying to vote repeatedly. This isn’t clearly a lot worse than the situation we have now, where you always vote maximum with no option.)
(that said I’d be interested in an unpacked version of your comment, sounded like the subtext was something like “this line of thinking is pointing somewhere useful but it doesn’t seem like you’re done thinking about it”. If that’s not the case, curious what you meant. If it is the case, curious about more detailed concerns about what would make for good or bad implementations of this)
Issues with Upvoting/Downvoting
We’ve talked in the past about making it so that if you have Karma Power 6, you can choose whether to give someone anywhere from 1-6 karma.
Upvoting
I think this is an okay solution, but I also think all meaningful upvotes basically cluster into two choices:
A. “I think this person just did a good thing I want to positively reinforce”
B. “I think this person did a thing important enough that everyone should pay attention to it.”
For A, I don’t think it obviously matters that you award more than 1 karma, and definitely never more than 3 karma. The karma should be mostly symbolic. For B, I’d almost always want to award them maximum karma. The choice of “well, do they really deserve 1, 2 or 3 karma for their pat-on-the-head?” doesn’t seem like a choice we should be forcing people to make.
The value in giving 1, 2 or 3 karma for a “small social reinforcement” is mostly about communicating “Social rewards from longtime trusted community members should feel better to get than social rewards from random newbies.” I’m not sure how strong a signal this is.
For “Pay Attention To This” upvotes, similarly, if you have 6 karma power, I don’t think it’s that interesting a choice to assign 4, 5 or 6.
And, you know, Choices Are Bad.
So, I currently support a paradigm where you just have Big Upvote and Small Upvote. I’m neutral between “small upvote is always 1” or “small upvote grows from 1 to 3 as you gain karma
This feels elegant. The problem is downvoting.
Downvoting
When downvoting, there’s a few different things I might be wanting to do (note: I don’t endorse all of these, this is just what my S1 is wanting to do).
A. This person made a small mistake, and should be mildly socially punished
B. This person was deeply wrong and should heavily punished
C. This post is getting too much attention relative to how good it is. It’s at 25 karma. I want to try to bring to around 15 or something.
D. This content should not be on the site (for any one of a number reasons), should not show up on the frontpage (meaning the karma should be at most zero) or the comment should be autocollapsed (karma should be −5)
When a newcomer shows up and does something I don’t like, my natural instinct is to try to keep their comment at 0 (which feels like the right level of “your thing was bad”, but in a way that feels more like an awkward silence than a slap in the face. I definitely need to be able to downvote by less than 6. The problem is as a user gains karma power, the amount I need to downvote just scales linearly.
This is all incompatible with the simple “Big Vote, Small Vote” paradigm. Which feels sad from an elegance/symmetry perspective.
So, that’s a thing I’m thinking about.
There’s another issue with voting, which is that I sometimes find a comment or post on the LW1 part of the site that I want to vote up or down, but I can’t because my 5 points of karma power would totally mess up the score of that comment/post in relation to its neighbors. I haven’t mentioned this before because I thought you might already have a plan to address that problem, or at worst I can wait until the variable upvote/downvote feature comes in. But if you didn’t have a specific plan for that and adopted “small upvote grows from 1 to 3 as you gain karma” then the problem wouldn’t get solved.
Also, is there an issue tracker for LW2? I wanted to check it to see if there’s an existing plan to address the above problem, but couldn’t find it through Google, from the About page, or by typing in “issue tracker” in the top right search box. There’s the old issue tracker at https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/issues but it doesn’t look like that’s being used anymore?
ETA: I found the issue tracker at https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/issues by randomly coming across a comment that linked to it. I’m still not sure how someone is supposed to find it.
I liked the idea I think you mentioned in an earlier thread about this, where each click increases vote weight by one. It’s conceptually very simple, which I think is a good property for a UI. It does involve more clicks to apply more voting power, but that doesn’t seem bad to me. How often does one need to give something the maximum amount of votes, such that extra clicks are a problem? It seems to me this would tend to default to giving everyone the same voting power, but allow users with more karma to summon more voting power with very slightly more effort if they think it’s warranted. That feels right to me.
If this is implemented, I think there should be a dot between the two vote buttons to reset the vote to 0.
(A possible downside I see is that it might somehow do the opposite—that voting will feel like something that is reinforced in a conditioning sense, so that users with more voting power will get more reinforcers since they do click->reward more times, and that this will actually give them a habit of wanting to apply the maximum vote more than they otherwise would because it feels satisfying to vote repeatedly. This isn’t clearly a lot worse than the situation we have now, where you always vote maximum with no option.)
How do I “small up vote” for “keep thinking about it”.
For now, I guess just do the thing you just did? :)
(that said I’d be interested in an unpacked version of your comment, sounded like the subtext was something like “this line of thinking is pointing somewhere useful but it doesn’t seem like you’re done thinking about it”. If that’s not the case, curious what you meant. If it is the case, curious about more detailed concerns about what would make for good or bad implementations of this)
It is clear that more thought I’d needed for a satisfactory answer here and I would encourage you to keep seeking a satisfactory solution.