IMO the thing voting is mostly useful for is sorting content, not users. You might imagine me writing twenty different things, and then only some of them making it in front of the eyes of most users, and this is done primarily through people upvoting and downvoting to say “I want to see more/less content like this”, and then more/less people being shown that content.
Yes, this has first-mover problems and various other things, but so do things like ‘recent discussion’ (where the number of comments that are spawned by something determines its ‘effective karma’).
Now, in situations where all the users see all the things, I don’t think you need this sort of thing—but I’m assuming LW-ish things are hoping to be larger than that scale.
IMO the thing voting is mostly useful for is sorting content, not users. You might imagine me writing twenty different things, and then only some of them making it in front of the eyes of most users, and this is done primarily through people upvoting and downvoting to say “I want to see more/less content like this”, and then more/less people being shown that content.
Yes, this has first-mover problems and various other things, but so do things like ‘recent discussion’ (where the number of comments that are spawned by something determines its ‘effective karma’).
Now, in situations where all the users see all the things, I don’t think you need this sort of thing—but I’m assuming LW-ish things are hoping to be larger than that scale.
Makes sense, thanks.