I’m curious what people think the natural exchange rate is between dollars and LW karma. Presumably it’s not zero, although I think it’s definitely less than $1; it takes me a lot more than $100 worth of effort to write a 100 karma post.
It’s a little bit weird to think about “how much would I pay for karma”, because the whole point of karma is that you can only get it through creating a specific kind of value, and if anyone could buy it then the whole system would lose it’s purpose. But it feels more natural to ask “how many karma is an hour of my time worth”, and then I can convert that through “how many dollars is an hour of my time worth”.
Unfortunately, it’s generally a lot easier to generate karma through commenting than through posting.
Once upon a time, I hear there was a 10x multiplier on post karma. 10x is a lot, but it seems pretty plausible to me that a ~3x multiplier on post karma would be good.
I think top level posts generate much more than 10x the value than the entire comments section combined, based off my impression that the majority of lurkers don’t get deep in the comments. I wonder if top level posts having a x^1.5 exponent would get closer to the ideal… That would also disincentivize post series...
You could instead ask: how much would you be willing to pay for 1 karma’s worth of the-sort-of-value-karma-measures?
Or perhaps: how much would the LW community altogether be willing to pay?
We could estimate the second by dividing the amount of money Scott Alexander makes on substack per month (where do I find this?) by our estimate of the monthly LW karma those articles would generate, if they appeared on LW. (100 per post??)
The value of a post grows faster than its karma. A 200 karma post is more than 2× harder to write and provides more than 2× the value of a 100 karma post. A 100 karma post is more than 2× harder to write and provides more than 2× the value of a 50 karma post.
I could probably be paid to write medium-to-decent quality LW posts pretty cheaply? I think today has given me an affordance for “write things for LW” that I didn’t use to have nearly as strongly.
I’m curious what people think the natural exchange rate is between dollars and LW karma. Presumably it’s not zero, although I think it’s definitely less than $1; it takes me a lot more than $100 worth of effort to write a 100 karma post.
It’s a little bit weird to think about “how much would I pay for karma”, because the whole point of karma is that you can only get it through creating a specific kind of value, and if anyone could buy it then the whole system would lose it’s purpose. But it feels more natural to ask “how many karma is an hour of my time worth”, and then I can convert that through “how many dollars is an hour of my time worth”.
Unfortunately, it’s generally a lot easier to generate karma through commenting than through posting.
Once upon a time, I hear there was a 10x multiplier on post karma. 10x is a lot, but it seems pretty plausible to me that a ~3x multiplier on post karma would be good.
This is the undoing of the multiplier: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uyCGvvai9Gco24iR8/the-great-karma-reckoning
I think top level posts generate much more than 10x the value than the entire comments section combined, based off my impression that the majority of lurkers don’t get deep in the comments. I wonder if top level posts having a x^1.5 exponent would get closer to the ideal… That would also disincentivize post series...
You could instead ask: how much would you be willing to pay for 1 karma’s worth of the-sort-of-value-karma-measures?
Or perhaps: how much would the LW community altogether be willing to pay?
We could estimate the second by dividing the amount of money Scott Alexander makes on substack per month (where do I find this?) by our estimate of the monthly LW karma those articles would generate, if they appeared on LW. (100 per post??)
The value of a post grows faster than its karma. A 200 karma post is more than 2× harder to write and provides more than 2× the value of a 100 karma post. A 100 karma post is more than 2× harder to write and provides more than 2× the value of a 50 karma post.
The LW team has, in the past, offered $500 for quality book reviews with a minimum post karma of about 50.
I could probably be paid to write medium-to-decent quality LW posts pretty cheaply? I think today has given me an affordance for “write things for LW” that I didn’t use to have nearly as strongly.
How much would you be willing to pay someone to write a 100(+) karma post?