A post’s score shortly after posting isn’t necessarily very meaningful. I’m not sure anyone but the downvoter can answer why the one person who voted first happened to vote it down.
LW takes downvotes too seriously. The more trigger-happy we are with them, the less painful and remarkable they will be, and the less “vote down” will feel like “report to moderator”. If this demotivates new users, maybe we should give each comment a karma point for showing up, like in the old days.
Although thinking about it, there is a case for a rational attachment to karma: it entitles us to say stupid things in the future.
Yvain, for example, could (at time of writing) make a comment so colossally stupid that it attracts 26527 downvotes, and he wouldn’t lose the ability to make top level posts. I’m not sure what that comment would be, but a part of me really wants to read it.
“Eliezer has been working really hard lately, and I think he should take a well-deserved and extremely long break before finishing the current storyline in Methods of Rationality.”
I think the context, and the quotation marks, are highly relevant. If the same comment were posted without quotes as a top-level comment in the HPMOR thread, I’d expect it to be downvoted to −3, but probably not beyond that, since that’s the threshold where most people stop seeing comments.
Everything about these characters and their strips is even more bizarre than “regular” Penny Arcade continuity with non sequiturs and Twisp speaking only in single word sentences. The duo was created out of Gabe and Tycho’s mystification that they were seemingly unable to create something that their readership would dislike
there is a case for a rational attachment to karma: it entitles us to say stupid things in the future.
And that’s really the point, isn’t it? It’s a quantified measurement of how much benefit of the doubt to give the karma holder. If someone posts something which seems stupid, and they have 0 karma, that increases my confidence that it really is stupid. If someone posts something which seems stupid, and they have 5000 karma, that shifts my confidence towards “I must be missing something.”
If you were the first person to see such a post (where Yvain made such a stupid comment that you believed that it deserved to attract 26527 downvotes), would you, personally, downvote it for stupidity or would you upvote it for interestingness?
EDIT: I’d be interested in answers from others as well.
Given that I’ve never encountered a comment that stupid, I’m not sure my intuition is correct here. I mean, we’re approaching “huge number of dust specks” level here. For all I know, the post would be so horrifying that I would be physically unable to avoid downvoting it.
Given his track record—which is roughly estimated by his karma score—I would assume a lot of things before I assumed that Yvain had genuinely posted something that impressively stupid. (Hacker, friend at keys, misunderstanding, etc.) So I probably wouldn’t vote on it, but if followup comments made it clear that yes, it was Yvain, and yes, it was really that stupid, I’d downvote the followup.
It would make me unhappy. I like the idea that my karma will probably go up indefinitely though slowly, as long as the site lasts.
You meant what might happen to LW’s culture? I really don’t know. I’m not sure about the effects of long term accumulation of karma on other people. I almost never look at other people’s karma totals.
How about if your karma score reflected only the karma you’d collected in the past few months? Or if it was weighted by how recently you’d collected it?
I’d kind of like to have both—current and discounted.
It’s not a great big deal. I think that if there was a change to discounted karma, I’d be sad for a fairly brief period, and then adjust to the new state of affairs.
A LW hack that allowed one to assign probabilities and relations to all relevant comments in a thread (from yourself and others) and put the corresponding joint probabilities on your conclusions, then view the corresponding graphs of other users, would be pretty cool.
I’ve been thinking about karma as a rough measure of community valuation. It is an expression of relative value, judged by answering questions like these:
Is this post worth the time it takes to read and understand?
Does this post add value to the community as a whole?
Can something interesting be learned from this post?
It also appears on LW that this value can be traded on. I have posted in a way that gained down-votes and criticism, but I was left with a sense of net gain. In this case commenters made excellent points helping me to shift my perspective on my topic and helping me to model the LW audience better. I paid for this education with karma (at least for a time). It was worth it.
I have seen other posters spend karma (perhaps unintentionally), gaining knowledge that would otherwise have required them spending time on reading the sequences.
A post’s score shortly after posting isn’t necessarily very meaningful. I’m not sure anyone but the downvoter can answer why the one person who voted first happened to vote it down.
LW takes downvotes too seriously. The more trigger-happy we are with them, the less painful and remarkable they will be, and the less “vote down” will feel like “report to moderator”. If this demotivates new users, maybe we should give each comment a karma point for showing up, like in the old days.
It is kind of embarrassing that we get so attached to karma. I mean here, of all places...
Well, no. Because it’s here, we’re really really self-aware and analytical about it. That doesn’t spare us from being subject to it. ;)
Although thinking about it, there is a case for a rational attachment to karma: it entitles us to say stupid things in the future.
Yvain, for example, could (at time of writing) make a comment so colossally stupid that it attracts 26527 downvotes, and he wouldn’t lose the ability to make top level posts. I’m not sure what that comment would be, but a part of me really wants to read it.
“Eliezer has been working really hard lately, and I think he should take a well-deserved and extremely long break before finishing the current storyline in Methods of Rationality.”
At +6 right now. It seems you fail at failing, Yvain. Fail harder.
I think the context, and the quotation marks, are highly relevant. If the same comment were posted without quotes as a top-level comment in the HPMOR thread, I’d expect it to be downvoted to −3, but probably not beyond that, since that’s the threshold where most people stop seeing comments.
Oh, well played, sir. Well played indeed.
Wow! Evil. Effective. Not to mention a great demonstration of the criticality of context.
Definitely deserves a link or mention in a newbie’s guide.
Reminds me of this
KILL MURDER KILL MURDER KILL MURDER KILL MURDER KILL
And that’s really the point, isn’t it? It’s a quantified measurement of how much benefit of the doubt to give the karma holder. If someone posts something which seems stupid, and they have 0 karma, that increases my confidence that it really is stupid. If someone posts something which seems stupid, and they have 5000 karma, that shifts my confidence towards “I must be missing something.”
Possibly relevant: Reddit’s bottom 10 comments as of 3 months ago. The lowest one is at about −7462.
If you were the first person to see such a post (where Yvain made such a stupid comment that you believed that it deserved to attract 26527 downvotes), would you, personally, downvote it for stupidity or would you upvote it for interestingness?
EDIT: I’d be interested in answers from others as well.
Given that I’ve never encountered a comment that stupid, I’m not sure my intuition is correct here. I mean, we’re approaching “huge number of dust specks” level here. For all I know, the post would be so horrifying that I would be physically unable to avoid downvoting it.
Given his track record—which is roughly estimated by his karma score—I would assume a lot of things before I assumed that Yvain had genuinely posted something that impressively stupid. (Hacker, friend at keys, misunderstanding, etc.) So I probably wouldn’t vote on it, but if followup comments made it clear that yes, it was Yvain, and yes, it was really that stupid, I’d downvote the followup.
I suspect I’d downvote it, but reply with “downvoted, but bravo!”
Indeed, I try to value good replies more than that steady upward creep of karma, but I know which one is the lower-effort hook.
What do you think would happen if there were a daily 5% attrition rate on karma?
It would make me unhappy. I like the idea that my karma will probably go up indefinitely though slowly, as long as the site lasts.
You meant what might happen to LW’s culture? I really don’t know. I’m not sure about the effects of long term accumulation of karma on other people. I almost never look at other people’s karma totals.
How about if your karma score reflected only the karma you’d collected in the past few months? Or if it was weighted by how recently you’d collected it?
I’d kind of like to have both—current and discounted.
It’s not a great big deal. I think that if there was a change to discounted karma, I’d be sad for a fairly brief period, and then adjust to the new state of affairs.
Personally, I like the upward karma creep, both as motivation to keep posting and to give longtime posters more credibility.
I want a “confidence level” drop-down menu, so I can express proper uncertainty without clogging up my sentences. :)
A LW hack that allowed one to assign probabilities and relations to all relevant comments in a thread (from yourself and others) and put the corresponding joint probabilities on your conclusions, then view the corresponding graphs of other users, would be pretty cool.
Karma dynamics seem interesting. Has anyone modeled LW as a hive mind? If so, what are it’s goals and what role does karma play?
I’ve been thinking about karma as a rough measure of community valuation. It is an expression of relative value, judged by answering questions like these:
Is this post worth the time it takes to read and understand?
Does this post add value to the community as a whole?
Can something interesting be learned from this post?
It also appears on LW that this value can be traded on. I have posted in a way that gained down-votes and criticism, but I was left with a sense of net gain. In this case commenters made excellent points helping me to shift my perspective on my topic and helping me to model the LW audience better. I paid for this education with karma (at least for a time). It was worth it.
I have seen other posters spend karma (perhaps unintentionally), gaining knowledge that would otherwise have required them spending time on reading the sequences.
I feel bad about downvoting something unless it’s got enough upvotes that I don’t think they’ll notice.