A mechanism I really like is making certain kinds of votes scarce. I’ve appreciated it when it was a function on other sites I’ve used, as I think it improved things.
For example, Stack Overflow lets you spend karma in various ways. Two that come to mind:
downvotes cost karma (a downvote causing −5 karma costs the downvoter 2 karma)
you can pay karma to get attention (you can effectively super strong upvote your own posts, but you pay karma to do it)
Ways this or something similar might work on LW:
you get a budget of strong votes (say 1 per day) that you can save and spend how you like but you can’t strong upvote everything
you get a budget of downvotes
strong votes cost karma
downvotes cost karma
I like this because it at least puts a break on excess use of votes in fights and otherwise makes these signals more valuable when they are used because they are not free like they are now.
The idea I am currently most interested in is “You can add short anonymous ‘reasons’ to your upvote or downvote, and such reasons are required for strong upvotes.”
(I’m not actually sure what this would do to the overall system, but I think it’d give us a better window into what voting patterns are common before making more explicitly functional changes to the system, and meanwhile probably subtly discourage strong upvotes and downvotes by adding a bit of cognitive labor to them)
Yeah, I think anything that adds a meaningful speedbump to any voting operation other than weak upvote is likely a step in the right direction of reshaping incentives.
A mechanism I really like is making certain kinds of votes scarce. I’ve appreciated it when it was a function on other sites I’ve used, as I think it improved things.
For example, Stack Overflow lets you spend karma in various ways. Two that come to mind:
downvotes cost karma (a downvote causing −5 karma costs the downvoter 2 karma)
you can pay karma to get attention (you can effectively super strong upvote your own posts, but you pay karma to do it)
Ways this or something similar might work on LW:
you get a budget of strong votes (say 1 per day) that you can save and spend how you like but you can’t strong upvote everything
you get a budget of downvotes
strong votes cost karma
downvotes cost karma
I like this because it at least puts a break on excess use of votes in fights and otherwise makes these signals more valuable when they are used because they are not free like they are now.
The idea I am currently most interested in is “You can add short anonymous ‘reasons’ to your upvote or downvote, and such reasons are required for strong upvotes.”
(I’m not actually sure what this would do to the overall system, but I think it’d give us a better window into what voting patterns are common before making more explicitly functional changes to the system, and meanwhile probably subtly discourage strong upvotes and downvotes by adding a bit of cognitive labor to them)
Yeah, I think anything that adds a meaningful speedbump to any voting operation other than weak upvote is likely a step in the right direction of reshaping incentives.