further update: I do think rewards are something like 10x less problematic than punishments, because humans are risk averse and fear punishment more than they desire reward. (“10x” is a stand-in for “whatever the psychological research says on how big the difference is between human response to rewards and punishments”)
[note: this subthread is far afield from the article—LW is about publication, not private thoughts (unless there’s a section I don’t know about where only specifically invited people can see things) . And LW karma is far from the sanctions under discussion in the rest of the post.]
Have you considered things to reduce the assymetric impact of up- and down-votes? Cap karma value at −5? Use downvotes as a divisor for upvotes (say, score is upvotes / (1 + 0.25 * downvotes)) rather than simple subtraction?
We’ve thought about things in that space, although any of the ideas would be a fairly major change, and we haven’t come up with anything we feel good enough about to commit to.
(We have done some subtle things to avoid making downvotes feel worse than they need to, such as not including the explicit number of downvotes)
further update: I do think rewards are something like 10x less problematic than punishments, because humans are risk averse and fear punishment more than they desire reward. (“10x” is a stand-in for “whatever the psychological research says on how big the difference is between human response to rewards and punishments”)
[note: this subthread is far afield from the article—LW is about publication, not private thoughts (unless there’s a section I don’t know about where only specifically invited people can see things) . And LW karma is far from the sanctions under discussion in the rest of the post.]
Have you considered things to reduce the assymetric impact of up- and down-votes? Cap karma value at −5? Use downvotes as a divisor for upvotes (say, score is upvotes / (1 + 0.25 * downvotes)) rather than simple subtraction?
We’ve thought about things in that space, although any of the ideas would be a fairly major change, and we haven’t come up with anything we feel good enough about to commit to.
(We have done some subtle things to avoid making downvotes feel worse than they need to, such as not including the explicit number of downvotes)