Oli and I disagree somewhat on voting systems. I think you get a huge benefit from doing voting at all, a small benefit from doing simple weighted voting (including not allowing people below ~10 karma to vote), and then there’s not much left from complicated vote weighting schemes (like eigenkarma or so on). Part of this is because more complicated systems don’t necessarily have more complicated gaming mechanics.
There are empirical questions involved; we haven’t looked at, for example, the graph of what karma converges to if you use my simplistic vote weighting scheme vs. an eigenkarma scheme, but my expectation is a very high correlation. (I’d be very surprised if it were less than .8, and pretty surprised if it were less than .95.)
I expect the counterfactual questions—”how would Manfred have voted if we were using eigenkarma instead of simple aggregation?”—to not make a huge difference in practice, altho they may make a difference for problem users.
Main benefits to karma are feedback for writers (both informative and hedonic) and sorting for attention conservation. Main costs are supporting the underlying tech, transparency / explaining the system, and dealing with efforts to game it.
(For example, if we just clicked a radio button and we had eigenkarma, I would be much more optimistic about it. As is, there are other features I would much rather have.)
Oli and I disagree somewhat on voting systems. I think you get a huge benefit from doing voting at all, a small benefit from doing simple weighted voting (including not allowing people below ~10 karma to vote), and then there’s not much left from complicated vote weighting schemes (like eigenkarma or so on). Part of this is because more complicated systems don’t necessarily have more complicated gaming mechanics.
There are empirical questions involved; we haven’t looked at, for example, the graph of what karma converges to if you use my simplistic vote weighting scheme vs. an eigenkarma scheme, but my expectation is a very high correlation. (I’d be very surprised if it were less than .8, and pretty surprised if it were less than .95.)
I expect the counterfactual questions—”how would Manfred have voted if we were using eigenkarma instead of simple aggregation?”—to not make a huge difference in practice, altho they may make a difference for problem users.
What’s the benefit? Also, what’s the harm? (to you)
Main benefits to karma are feedback for writers (both informative and hedonic) and sorting for attention conservation. Main costs are supporting the underlying tech, transparency / explaining the system, and dealing with efforts to game it.
(For example, if we just clicked a radio button and we had eigenkarma, I would be much more optimistic about it. As is, there are other features I would much rather have.)