The change applying retroactively doesn’t seem like a bug to me. Any debate should be over whether the restriction is a good general rule or not. If people think it’s a good restriction then it should apply equally to everyone. The fact that some people have already significantly exceeded their downvote limit is an interesting data point—it suggests that some users have had a much stronger influence on negative ratings than others. Depending on what people want the feature to achieve that could be seen as either supporting the rule or opposing it.
Any debate should be over whether the restriction is a good general rule or not. If people think it’s a good restriction then it should apply equally to everyone.
A law is there to influence behavior. Behavior that happened before the law was known, the law that is far from being self-evident, shouldn’t be punished. The intended correction of behavior is decrease in the rate of downvoting, but retroactive application of a new law transforms that correction into the total absence of downvoting, which is not at all what the law was intended to achieve.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the new rule was intended to achieve I have to admit. The fact that some people with fairly high karma had already greatly exceeded the limit was interesting to me though—it suggested a possible skewing of karma scores by certain individuals downvoting with much higher frequency than others, to an extent that surprised me. If part of the intention is to avoid some individuals having undue influence on karma scores (which some comments seemed to suggest) then applying the restriction retroactively achieves that.
I wouldn’t generally support retroactive laws but I don’t find the law analogy very helpful here. I find it interesting that you use the word punished as well—it seems to me that the value of the karma system is as a kind of ‘collective intelligence’ mechanism that provides ratings valuable to the community as a whole through the aggregation of individual votes. I don’t see it as a way to make the forum more enjoyable to use because of the ‘reward’ of up or downvoting other people’s comments. Saying punish suggests that part of the reason people use the forum is to enjoy the rush of saying ‘Yay’ or ‘Boo’ to things they like/dislike. That may be true but it wasn’t how I was thinking of karma.
The change applying retroactively doesn’t seem like a bug to me. Any debate should be over whether the restriction is a good general rule or not. If people think it’s a good restriction then it should apply equally to everyone. The fact that some people have already significantly exceeded their downvote limit is an interesting data point—it suggests that some users have had a much stronger influence on negative ratings than others. Depending on what people want the feature to achieve that could be seen as either supporting the rule or opposing it.
A law is there to influence behavior. Behavior that happened before the law was known, the law that is far from being self-evident, shouldn’t be punished. The intended correction of behavior is decrease in the rate of downvoting, but retroactive application of a new law transforms that correction into the total absence of downvoting, which is not at all what the law was intended to achieve.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the new rule was intended to achieve I have to admit. The fact that some people with fairly high karma had already greatly exceeded the limit was interesting to me though—it suggested a possible skewing of karma scores by certain individuals downvoting with much higher frequency than others, to an extent that surprised me. If part of the intention is to avoid some individuals having undue influence on karma scores (which some comments seemed to suggest) then applying the restriction retroactively achieves that.
I wouldn’t generally support retroactive laws but I don’t find the law analogy very helpful here. I find it interesting that you use the word punished as well—it seems to me that the value of the karma system is as a kind of ‘collective intelligence’ mechanism that provides ratings valuable to the community as a whole through the aggregation of individual votes. I don’t see it as a way to make the forum more enjoyable to use because of the ‘reward’ of up or downvoting other people’s comments. Saying punish suggests that part of the reason people use the forum is to enjoy the rush of saying ‘Yay’ or ‘Boo’ to things they like/dislike. That may be true but it wasn’t how I was thinking of karma.