Karma is worthless. Charging karma for downvotes will change nothing.
For a new visitor with low-ish karma, downvotes mean losing the ability to post or comment or something like that. That’s what I remember, I stopped posting negative karma magnets long enough ago that I haven’t dipped to that range in a while. But the point is what happens to new visitors.
That “tiny bit” of moderation is vastly more than is done here. You complain about discussion threads getting downvoted, but these threads aren’t closed, deleted, or otherwise removed nearly as often as their stackexchange cognates.
1) these threads and comments are hidden, you have to click to look in them as though unpopularity were a predictor of basiliskitude. 2) stackexchange sites are more purposeful (help on java, help on android, etc.) than “discussion” should be so a higher level of editing makes sense. With an easy ability to jump from thread to thread, lesswrong should not require pruning as much as it requires labeling and easy navigation.
I think discussion needs to be more “social.” We have the main board for the highly edited works of art. If you want active thinkers who are not already lesswrongers to hang around here and possibly become sufficiently infected, I think you need to have a place where they can shoot the shit, hack at the feet of the icons just in case they are clay.
I base my opinion on my own experiences as a student at Caltech and as a professor after that. Perhaps I did not publish my beer soaked ideas about quanta in journals, but I sure as hell found a lively discussion of these and other philosophical considerations readily available, and their availability made me a smarter physicist.
For a new visitor with low-ish karma, downvotes mean losing the ability to post or comment or something like that. That’s what I remember, I stopped posting negative karma magnets long enough ago that I haven’t dipped to that range in a while. But the point is what happens to new visitors.
1) these threads and comments are hidden, you have to click to look in them as though unpopularity were a predictor of basiliskitude.
2) stackexchange sites are more purposeful (help on java, help on android, etc.) than “discussion” should be so a higher level of editing makes sense. With an easy ability to jump from thread to thread, lesswrong should not require pruning as much as it requires labeling and easy navigation.
I think discussion needs to be more “social.” We have the main board for the highly edited works of art. If you want active thinkers who are not already lesswrongers to hang around here and possibly become sufficiently infected, I think you need to have a place where they can shoot the shit, hack at the feet of the icons just in case they are clay.
I base my opinion on my own experiences as a student at Caltech and as a professor after that. Perhaps I did not publish my beer soaked ideas about quanta in journals, but I sure as hell found a lively discussion of these and other philosophical considerations readily available, and their availability made me a smarter physicist.