PSA: Voting on relevance is an important, underserved, and easy to contribute to area of the tagging system.
One person can create a tag, make a good description, and find a bunch of posts that fit it, but it takes multiple people’s votes to create a decent ordering of posts from most to least relevant. Which posts are listed first will be an important part of the user experience.
This will be especially important for the more crowded tags, like the core tags, history, math, science, statistics, ai risk, and so forth.
Contributing can be as easy as just going through the list and upvoting posts that you’ve read and think are a good fit for the tag.
Edit: It would be nice to have a spreadsheet sorting tags by something like average relevance karma per post, to identify which tags most need votes.
Hey Multicore, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this alternate voting system I had proposed awhile ago, which (among other goals) aims to shift things such that it’s less necessary for multiple people to collaborate to vote on stuff.
The team has gone back and forth on whether it’d be an improvement, and/or whether it’s enough of an improvement to be worth the dev-cost to switch.
I agree with most of your analysis in the comments (many downsides to karma, multiple choice has some advantages intuition-wise and makes it easier for a single user to make an ordering), but I thought of a couple more points. My mind seems to only be coming up with downsides of the multiple choice system, which might be because I’m prone to rationalizing why the status quo is good.
Multiple choice has strategic voting implications too. If I think a 150 karma post and a 50 karma post are both “Top” relevance, but that the 50 karma post is better, I might rate the 150 karma post as “high” or lower.
Multiple choice makes it harder to see where in the ordering your vote would make a post end up. Additionally, your vote either has no immediate effect or moves the post around by a lot, so a fine-grained adjustment is impossible. That might not necessarily be bad though, if post karma mattering is desired.
If ordering is based only on the median vote, this makes it easy for a troll to vandalize a tag page even when the tagging system is mature. Just put the tag on a bunch of posts that don’t already have it and rate them all “Top”. With karma, the post order is more stable once a lot of people have voted. (This is the double edge of making it easy for a single person to have a big impact.)
However, these concerns balance out against the benefits you listed, so overall I don’t have a strong opinion on which is better.
PSA: Voting on relevance is an important, underserved, and easy to contribute to area of the tagging system.
One person can create a tag, make a good description, and find a bunch of posts that fit it, but it takes multiple people’s votes to create a decent ordering of posts from most to least relevant. Which posts are listed first will be an important part of the user experience.
This will be especially important for the more crowded tags, like the core tags, history, math, science, statistics, ai risk, and so forth.
Contributing can be as easy as just going through the list and upvoting posts that you’ve read and think are a good fit for the tag.
Edit: It would be nice to have a spreadsheet sorting tags by something like average relevance karma per post, to identify which tags most need votes.
Hey Multicore, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this alternate voting system I had proposed awhile ago, which (among other goals) aims to shift things such that it’s less necessary for multiple people to collaborate to vote on stuff.
The team has gone back and forth on whether it’d be an improvement, and/or whether it’s enough of an improvement to be worth the dev-cost to switch.
I agree with most of your analysis in the comments (many downsides to karma, multiple choice has some advantages intuition-wise and makes it easier for a single user to make an ordering), but I thought of a couple more points. My mind seems to only be coming up with downsides of the multiple choice system, which might be because I’m prone to rationalizing why the status quo is good.
Multiple choice has strategic voting implications too. If I think a 150 karma post and a 50 karma post are both “Top” relevance, but that the 50 karma post is better, I might rate the 150 karma post as “high” or lower.
Multiple choice makes it harder to see where in the ordering your vote would make a post end up. Additionally, your vote either has no immediate effect or moves the post around by a lot, so a fine-grained adjustment is impossible. That might not necessarily be bad though, if post karma mattering is desired.
If ordering is based only on the median vote, this makes it easy for a troll to vandalize a tag page even when the tagging system is mature. Just put the tag on a bunch of posts that don’t already have it and rate them all “Top”. With karma, the post order is more stable once a lot of people have voted. (This is the double edge of making it easy for a single person to have a big impact.)
However, these concerns balance out against the benefits you listed, so overall I don’t have a strong opinion on which is better.