Lots of people with no clue about something aren’t going to magically transform into a method for discerning clue regardless of aggregation method—garbage in garbage out.
I think that’s the core of the disagreement: I assume that if the forum is worth reading in the first place, then the average forum user’s opinion of a comment’s quality tends to correlate with my own. In which case something have lots of upvotes is evidence in favor of me also thinking that it will be a good comment.
This assumption does break down if you assume that the other people have “no clue”, but if that’s your opinion of a forum’s users, then why are you reading that forum in the first place?
“Clue” is not a total ordering of people from best to worst, it varies from topic to topic.
The other issue to consider is what you view the purpose of a forum is.
Consider a subreddit like TheDonald. Presumably they may use karma to get consensus on what a good comment is, also. But TheDonald is an echo chamber. If your opinions are very correlated with opinions of others in a forum, then naturally you get a number that tells you what everyone agrees is good.
That can be useful, sometimes. But this isn’t quality, it’s just community consensus, and that can be arbitrarily far off. “Less wrong,” as-is-written-on-the-tin is supposedly about something more objective than just coming to a community consensus. You need true signal for that, and karma, being a mirror a community holds to itself, cannot give it to you.
edit: the form of your question is: “if you don’t like TheDonald, why are you reading TheDonald?” Is that what you want to be saying?
I think that’s the core of the disagreement: I assume that if the forum is worth reading in the first place, then the average forum user’s opinion of a comment’s quality tends to correlate with my own. In which case something have lots of upvotes is evidence in favor of me also thinking that it will be a good comment.
This assumption does break down if you assume that the other people have “no clue”, but if that’s your opinion of a forum’s users, then why are you reading that forum in the first place?
“Clue” is not a total ordering of people from best to worst, it varies from topic to topic.
The other issue to consider is what you view the purpose of a forum is.
Consider a subreddit like TheDonald. Presumably they may use karma to get consensus on what a good comment is, also. But TheDonald is an echo chamber. If your opinions are very correlated with opinions of others in a forum, then naturally you get a number that tells you what everyone agrees is good.
That can be useful, sometimes. But this isn’t quality, it’s just community consensus, and that can be arbitrarily far off. “Less wrong,” as-is-written-on-the-tin is supposedly about something more objective than just coming to a community consensus. You need true signal for that, and karma, being a mirror a community holds to itself, cannot give it to you.
edit: the form of your question is: “if you don’t like TheDonald, why are you reading TheDonald?” Is that what you want to be saying?