As a lurker, I failed to understand this system in a way that led to me completely ignoring it (I probably would have engaged more with LW this week had I understood, having noticed now it feels too late to bother), so I feel like I should document what went wrong for me.
I read several front-page posts about the system but did not see this one until today. The posts I read were having fun with it rather than focusing on communication, plus the whole thing was obviously an extended April Fool’s joke so I managed to come away with a host of misconceptions including total ignorance of the core “no really, karma equals actual money for you” feature. I assumed that if it was serious people would be trying a lot harder to communicate the incentives to people (compare announcements of LW bounties, which I routinely manage to hear about even in periods where I’ve fallen out of the habit of checking this website).
On top of “karma equals money” being fundamentally implausible, an April 1st joke named Good Heart Tokens feels like it was designed to not be taken seriously. If the system was meant to incentivize posts from lurkers, more effort could have been put into making the incentives clear.
Edit: Making this comment I double-checked some things and thought I came to a fully correct understanding of the system but upon hitting submit I became confused again. This post says that self-votes don’t count but my fresh comment displays as having 1 token. There is a token counter on the user profile page, but as far as I can tell from looking at the pages of a few random users, that counter is tracking neither karma nor any calculation I can imagine representing token count, I have no idea what it’s doing.
As a lurker, I failed to understand this system in a way that led to me completely ignoring it (I probably would have engaged more with LW this week had I understood, having noticed now it feels too late to bother), so I feel like I should document what went wrong for me.
Haha, same. I don’t blame this site though, I blame the deluge of April Fool’s content every year for training my brain to aggressively filter April Fool’s content. It’s just like banner ads, I don’t even see them now.
So I FINALLY just read this post because I was curious why the April Fool’s thing was still on the site. All good though, I ended up with almost 50 hearts out of nowhere. Honestly it feels great because I had no idea they were coming. That’s a lot of change to find in your couch!
I assumed that (1) the numbers attached to posts and comments include self-votes, (2) the total on the profile page is the sum of these but excluding the self-votes, or maybe a potentially-slightly-out-of-date version of that depending on how the code is built, and (3) the real-money payout is the sum of all the numbers excluding the self-votes at the end of the week.
Are the numbers you found when looking at random users’ pages inconsistent with that?
Looking at more random users, I think tokens earned via posting are being undercounted somehow. Users with only comments display as having exactly the amount of tokens I would expect from total karma on eligible posts minus self-votes, but looking at users with posts made after April 2 (to avoid complications from a changing post-value formula) consistently have less than the “comment votes plus 3x post votes, not counting self votes” formula would predict. For instance, Zvi has two posts (currently 52 and 68 karma) and zero comments in the last week. With strength 2 selfvotes, (52-2+68-2)*3=348 expected tokens which is a significant mismatch from his displayed 302. It doesn’t seem to be out of date since his displayed tokens change instantly in response to me voting on the posts, is something going wrong or is there some weird special case way of voting on posts that doesn’t get immediately reflected in the user page?
Posts get self-strong-upvoted by default, and strong upvote strength is modified by user karma. Zvi is a high karma user so his strong votes are like +10. Plug that number in instead of 2 and that accounts for the discrepancy you noticed.
I thought maybe deleted posts/comments or unpublished drafts could explain the difference. I understand both of those categories contribute to karma/hearts, but they don’t show up on the user’s page. However, these would have to have been significantly downvoted to match the direction of the discrepancy.
The numbers attached to posts and comments seem to be a straightforward reskin of karma: includes self-votes, does not include the 3x multiplier for posts. The token counter in user profiles seems to update instantly (I tried voting up and down on posts and comments then refreshing the page of the user to test) but undercounts in ways I don’t understand. For instance, this random user currently displays as 207 karma (edit: tokens, not karma, doh) based on a post with 68 karma and about a dozen comments with net karma-minus-selfvotes of ~15. I can tell it’s up to date because it went up by 3 when I upvoted his post, but it seems like it ought to be ~216 (post karma times three plus comment karma) and I can’t explain the missing tokens, and several of the random users I looked at displayed this sort of obvious undercounting.
As a lurker, I failed to understand this system in a way that led to me completely ignoring it (I probably would have engaged more with LW this week had I understood, having noticed now it feels too late to bother), so I feel like I should document what went wrong for me.
I read several front-page posts about the system but did not see this one until today. The posts I read were having fun with it rather than focusing on communication, plus the whole thing was obviously an extended April Fool’s joke so I managed to come away with a host of misconceptions including total ignorance of the core “no really, karma equals actual money for you” feature. I assumed that if it was serious people would be trying a lot harder to communicate the incentives to people (compare announcements of LW bounties, which I routinely manage to hear about even in periods where I’ve fallen out of the habit of checking this website).
On top of “karma equals money” being fundamentally implausible, an April 1st joke named Good Heart Tokens feels like it was designed to not be taken seriously. If the system was meant to incentivize posts from lurkers, more effort could have been put into making the incentives clear.
Edit: Making this comment I double-checked some things and thought I came to a fully correct understanding of the system but upon hitting submit I became confused again. This post says that self-votes don’t count but my fresh comment displays as having 1 token. There is a token counter on the user profile page, but as far as I can tell from looking at the pages of a few random users, that counter is tracking neither karma nor any calculation I can imagine representing token count, I have no idea what it’s doing.
Haha, same. I don’t blame this site though, I blame the deluge of April Fool’s content every year for training my brain to aggressively filter April Fool’s content. It’s just like banner ads, I don’t even see them now.
So I FINALLY just read this post because I was curious why the April Fool’s thing was still on the site. All good though, I ended up with almost 50 hearts out of nowhere. Honestly it feels great because I had no idea they were coming. That’s a lot of change to find in your couch!
I assumed that (1) the numbers attached to posts and comments include self-votes, (2) the total on the profile page is the sum of these but excluding the self-votes, or maybe a potentially-slightly-out-of-date version of that depending on how the code is built, and (3) the real-money payout is the sum of all the numbers excluding the self-votes at the end of the week.
Are the numbers you found when looking at random users’ pages inconsistent with that?
(gjm’s take is correct)
Looking at more random users, I think tokens earned via posting are being undercounted somehow. Users with only comments display as having exactly the amount of tokens I would expect from total karma on eligible posts minus self-votes, but looking at users with posts made after April 2 (to avoid complications from a changing post-value formula) consistently have less than the “comment votes plus 3x post votes, not counting self votes” formula would predict. For instance, Zvi has two posts (currently 52 and 68 karma) and zero comments in the last week. With strength 2 selfvotes, (52-2+68-2)*3=348 expected tokens which is a significant mismatch from his displayed 302. It doesn’t seem to be out of date since his displayed tokens change instantly in response to me voting on the posts, is something going wrong or is there some weird special case way of voting on posts that doesn’t get immediately reflected in the user page?
Posts get self-strong-upvoted by default, and strong upvote strength is modified by user karma. Zvi is a high karma user so his strong votes are like +10. Plug that number in instead of 2 and that accounts for the discrepancy you noticed.
Doh. I forget how much faster strong upvotes scaled with user karma, that resolves all my confusion.
This coment indicates that early posts might not have been given the full multiplier, but both of Zvi’s posts went up after this.
I thought maybe deleted posts/comments or unpublished drafts could explain the difference. I understand both of those categories contribute to karma/hearts, but they don’t show up on the user’s page. However, these would have to have been significantly downvoted to match the direction of the discrepancy.
The numbers attached to posts and comments seem to be a straightforward reskin of karma: includes self-votes, does not include the 3x multiplier for posts. The token counter in user profiles seems to update instantly (I tried voting up and down on posts and comments then refreshing the page of the user to test) but undercounts in ways I don’t understand. For instance, this random user currently displays as 207
karma(edit: tokens, not karma, doh) based on a post with 68 karma and about a dozen comments with net karma-minus-selfvotes of ~15. I can tell it’s up to date because it went up by 3 when I upvoted his post, but it seems like it ought to be ~216 (post karma times three plus comment karma) and I can’t explain the missing tokens, and several of the random users I looked at displayed this sort of obvious undercounting.