The LW karma obviously has its flaws, per Goodhart’s law. It is used anyway, because the alternative is having other problems, and for the moment this seems like a reasonable trade-off.
The punishment for “heresies” is actually very mild. As long as one posts respected content in general, posting a “heretical” comment every now and then does not ruin their karma. (Compare to people having their lives changed dramatically because of one tweet.) The punishment accumulates mostly for people whose only purpose here is to post “heresies”. Also, LW karma does not prevent anyone from posting “heresies” on a different website. Thus, people can keep positive LW karma even if their main topic is talking how LW is fundamentally wrong as long as they can avoid being annoying (for example by posting hundred LW-critical posts on their personal website, posting a short summary with hyperlinks on LW, and afterwards using LW mostly to debate other topics).
Blackmail typically attacks you in real life, i.e. you can’t limit the scope of impact. If losing an online account on a website X would be the worst possible outcome of one’s behavior at the website X, life would be easy. (You would only need to keep your accounts on different websites separated from each other.) It was already mentioned somewhere in this debate that blackmail often uses the difference between norms in different communities, i.e. that your local-norm-following behavior in one context can be local-norm-breaking in another context. This is quite unlike LW karma.
The LW karma obviously has its flaws, per Goodhart’s law. It is used anyway, because the alternative is having other problems, and for the moment this seems like a reasonable trade-off.
The punishment for “heresies” is actually very mild. As long as one posts respected content in general, posting a “heretical” comment every now and then does not ruin their karma. (Compare to people having their lives changed dramatically because of one tweet.) The punishment accumulates mostly for people whose only purpose here is to post “heresies”. Also, LW karma does not prevent anyone from posting “heresies” on a different website. Thus, people can keep positive LW karma even if their main topic is talking how LW is fundamentally wrong as long as they can avoid being annoying (for example by posting hundred LW-critical posts on their personal website, posting a short summary with hyperlinks on LW, and afterwards using LW mostly to debate other topics).
Blackmail typically attacks you in real life, i.e. you can’t limit the scope of impact. If losing an online account on a website X would be the worst possible outcome of one’s behavior at the website X, life would be easy. (You would only need to keep your accounts on different websites separated from each other.) It was already mentioned somewhere in this debate that blackmail often uses the difference between norms in different communities, i.e. that your local-norm-following behavior in one context can be local-norm-breaking in another context. This is quite unlike LW karma.