Over the years I’ve gone through periods of time where I can devote the effort/time to thoroughly reading LW and periods of time where I can basically just skim it.
Because of this I’m in a good position to judge the reliability of karma in surfacing content for its readability.
My judgement is that karma strongly correlates with readability.
That’s an illusion of readability though, it’s only sorting in a fairly arbitrary way.
As long as it’s not anti-correlated with quality, it helps.
It doesn’t matter if the top comment isn’t actually the very best comment. So long as the system does better than random, I as a reader benefit.
Over the years I’ve gone through periods of time where I can devote the effort/time to thoroughly reading LW and periods of time where I can basically just skim it.
Because of this I’m in a good position to judge the reliability of karma in surfacing content for its readability.
My judgement is that karma strongly correlates with readability.