It definitely suggests karma is an imperfect measure of quality/usefulness but I don’t think that automatically means we’re making the wrong trade-offs.
(these thoughts are more general than this particular post, which I think is a little different just for being fiction).
Some posts require more energy than others to get the value out of them. When you’re first looking at a post, it can be hard to estimate what the total return on energy is. In particular “deeply challenging and thought provoking” can look a lot “total bullshit”, especially if the writer hasn’t put a ton of skill and effort into making their challenging post easier to access. When faced with a new post that is definitely going to take a lot of energy and has an uncertain payoff, considering the reputation of the writer can be a legit useful heuristic.
This has a bunch of negative consequences, but it’s really unclear to me if those outweigh the benefits, or if something could be done to improve the pareto frontier.
It definitely suggests karma is an imperfect measure of quality/usefulness but I don’t think that automatically means we’re making the wrong trade-offs.
(these thoughts are more general than this particular post, which I think is a little different just for being fiction).
Some posts require more energy than others to get the value out of them. When you’re first looking at a post, it can be hard to estimate what the total return on energy is. In particular “deeply challenging and thought provoking” can look a lot “total bullshit”, especially if the writer hasn’t put a ton of skill and effort into making their challenging post easier to access. When faced with a new post that is definitely going to take a lot of energy and has an uncertain payoff, considering the reputation of the writer can be a legit useful heuristic.
This has a bunch of negative consequences, but it’s really unclear to me if those outweigh the benefits, or if something could be done to improve the pareto frontier.