I actually think it’s fairly bad that Strong Upvotes aren’t asshole-filter-proof, and in this case I bite the bullet in the direction of “we should limit the power of strong upvotes somehow so they can’t be abused.” (I’ve thought this for awhile, it just hasn’t been top priority, and/or the team couldn’t come up with an improvement that seemed better to everyone)
That said, I think you did just remind me that there a ton of vulnerabilities in the karma system that absolutely rely on people not abusing them most of the time, and yeah I just actually retract that part of my argument. I do think we should eventually someday have a karma system that’s more resilient, and the only reason it’s not a higher priority is that in fact people are mostly good people, and the system just actually mostly works, so it’s not as high priority as other site changes.
But, I do still stand by “manipulating the position/weighting/visibility of posts is basically what “see more / less of this” is actually supposed to mean, and is basically in the spirit of it.
We encourage people to vote such that upvote means “I want to see more of this” and downvote means “I want to see less of this.”
I basically always interpreted this to mean “I want to see more/less of this, and among the things that factor into what I want to see more/less of are subtle things about site norms that impact other people.”
I realize it’s ambiguously worded.
My overall biggest crux here is “Karma is so far away from being a robust system that means concrete things that you just shouldn’t worry too much about what exactly it means. You should know that other people are using it differently from you [for any value of ‘you’]. It’s a vague, kludgy approximation that seems to mostly output reasonable things, and that’s basically fine for now.”
The points I was trying to make were (kinda scattered across the comments here!):
1. It is advantageous if people have a shared understanding of the system
2. Voting your own belief actually should work pretty well
3. There is a written norm in favour of voting your own belief
I think we disagree on all 3 to some extent, at least in how important they are. I think if we lose the disagreement on number 3 then disagreements on 1&2 are less important.
I’m ok with a norm of voting based somewhat on target karma (making it overly strong an effect I think would be detrimental), especially as this is now common knowledge and seems to be most people’s preference.
This whole thing has resolved some of my confusion as to why karma scores end up the way they do.
I want to note that the I see the “vote towards the ideal karma” as completely compatible with “vote your belief.”
I think there are two fairly different questions here:
Should your vote include your beliefs about how much you want other people to see a given post, or what you think is best for others?
Should you vote based on your ideal total-karma for a post
It so happens I think we might disagree about both of them (and disagree about what the best interpretation of the current rules are about them). But, those are quite different questions, and you can do the second based entirely on your own preferences/beliefs.
When a post is at 50, I can think that is a bit too high just from my general sense of what I want to see more of on the site. And it’s be throwing away information about my own beliefs to not give me the fine-gradation of “I want to see these posts on the site about as often as I would if they got 50 karma, not the amount that I would if they got 200 karma.”
When a post is at 50, I can think that is a bit too high just from my general sense of what I want to see more of on the site. And it’s be throwing away information about my own beliefs to not give me the fine-gradation of “I want to see these posts on the site about as often as I would if they got 50 karma, not the amount that I would if they got 200 karma.”
This is true when the equilibrium position of the karma system is set to Total Karma Voting.
I think that Blind voting would move the karma system to a new equilibrium. I’m not convinced we should do so as I think it would be a fairly unstable equilibrium but I think it would work if everyone did it and would allow for fine grained expressions of your belief.
The equilibrium I envisage would be that the current amount of something that LW has is taken into account when people blind vote their opinion.
As an example, I think the reason that joke comments can get fairly high karma is that they’re rare. If more people start writing joke comments as a result then that’s fine for as long as people are upvoting.
At some point the people who value the jokes least stop upvoting them or start downvoting them. This continues until the reward experienced by the jokers roughly matches the effort taken or some other balancing factor.
In the case of low positive value posts, some people have a higher threshold for what they will give an upvote for and the more low positive value posts there are the fewer people will upvote them.
(I think its important to note here that we are not really that homogenous in our opinions and weightings of different sources of value. Alot of the worries about Blind voting seem to assume that we’re all going to vote the same way about the same posts which I think is highly unrealistic. There also seems to be the assumption that everything fractionally above 0 value will get an upvote which again seems unrealistic. Frankly I think that anyone who can write a post which is good enough that it persuades 100 different people with different standards to click the upvote button then they deserve to get 150 karma!)
The key then is that in order to get an oversized reward for the amount of effort put in, you have to do better than average at providing value.
In Blind Voting, accounting-for-how-much-of-a-certain-thing-there-currently-is-on-LW is doing the same thing as considering-what-message-the-total-karma-sends does with Total Karma Voting. The former seems to have a lag in the message getting out but I think when you’re in a rough equilibrium the lag is relatively short.
So this brings me onto what I think the main cost of Total karma voting is. If an author looks at a post which has 25 karma from 10 votes, what does it mean? Roughly speaking it means that it was considered about as valuable as another 25 karma post. The 10 votes tells the author how efficient the karma market was for the post and possibly gives limited information on how varied the opinions were.
With Blind voting the author sees that and knows that 10 people had an opinion that this post was wanted more or less and that their average strength of opinion was 2.5 karma points in favour. This probably consists of something like 3 people who want alot more like it and 7 people who want a little more like it (or possibly some who wish there was less like it or were just yay/booing).
I agree that karma is a kludge and the true meaning isn’t necessarily clear but with Blind voting it seems importantly less of a kludge and some extra information can be extracted.
I want to note that the I see the “vote towards the ideal karma” as completely compatible with “vote your belief.”
Agreed. I was looking for a shorthand way of referring to the different voting policies but am yet to find one which is satisfactory—you’ve (rightly) shot down a couple of my ideas! Total Karma voting seems fine for one policy, maybe direct opinion voting for the other? If you shoot that one down too you can come up with your own!
I think “blind voting” captures the distinction better – the key difference is whether you’re supposed to look at or model the outcome.
Btw another reason I think “take total karma into account” is important is because of how big a slap downvotes feel like. Blind voting both means that “mildly good comments” will get like 80 karma, but also means that mildly bad comments will get like −80 karma, which would make the site feel very punishing.
I do think that it would be very bad if this happened. However I don’t think this is likely. Quoting my other comment:
I think its important to note here that we are not really that homogenous in our opinions and weightings of different sources of value. Alot of the worries about Blind voting seem to assume that we’re all going to vote the same way about the same posts which I think is highly unrealistic. There also seems to be the assumption that everything fractionally above 0 value will get an upvote which again seems unrealistic.
This seems even more true for downvotes—I think people realise that downvotes feel extra bad and only use them sparingly. For instance, I only really downvote when I think something has been a definite breaking of a conversational norm or if someone is doubling down on an argument which has been convincingly refuted.
I think a spread of opinions on what constitutes a downvote (and a general feeling that comments get less votes in general) would make the −80 only happen to super egregiously bad comments.
It seems the definition of abuse of Strong Upvotes is about a person using them all the time. You could say that if a person uses Strong votes more then X% of the time they vote the impact of their Strong votes gets reduced.
Adjusting in the other direction seems useful as well. If someone Strong Upvotes ten times less frequently than average I would want to see their strong upvote as worth somewhat more.
There’s a hypothetical direction we could go where voting-weight is determined based on your vote frequency. The main disadvantage of this is that it becomes a lot harder to predict and conceptualize what voting does.
One hesitation habryka had about penalizing excessive strong downvotes is people would end up trying to conserve them as a resource, like a videogame where you end up hoarding all your potions because you “might need them some day” and never actually use them.
I actually think it’s fairly bad that Strong Upvotes aren’t asshole-filter-proof, and in this case I bite the bullet in the direction of “we should limit the power of strong upvotes somehow so they can’t be abused.” (I’ve thought this for awhile, it just hasn’t been top priority, and/or the team couldn’t come up with an improvement that seemed better to everyone)
That said, I think you did just remind me that there a ton of vulnerabilities in the karma system that absolutely rely on people not abusing them most of the time, and yeah I just actually retract that part of my argument. I do think we should eventually someday have a karma system that’s more resilient, and the only reason it’s not a higher priority is that in fact people are mostly good people, and the system just actually mostly works, so it’s not as high priority as other site changes.
But, I do still stand by “manipulating the position/weighting/visibility of posts is basically what “see more / less of this” is actually supposed to mean, and is basically in the spirit of it.
I basically always interpreted this to mean “I want to see more/less of this, and among the things that factor into what I want to see more/less of are subtle things about site norms that impact other people.”
I realize it’s ambiguously worded.
My overall biggest crux here is “Karma is so far away from being a robust system that means concrete things that you just shouldn’t worry too much about what exactly it means. You should know that other people are using it differently from you [for any value of ‘you’]. It’s a vague, kludgy approximation that seems to mostly output reasonable things, and that’s basically fine for now.”
Ok, I think I actually agree with your crux.
The points I was trying to make were (kinda scattered across the comments here!):
1. It is advantageous if people have a shared understanding of the system
2. Voting your own belief actually should work pretty well
3. There is a written norm in favour of voting your own belief
I think we disagree on all 3 to some extent, at least in how important they are. I think if we lose the disagreement on number 3 then disagreements on 1&2 are less important.
I’m ok with a norm of voting based somewhat on target karma (making it overly strong an effect I think would be detrimental), especially as this is now common knowledge and seems to be most people’s preference.
This whole thing has resolved some of my confusion as to why karma scores end up the way they do.
I want to note that the I see the “vote towards the ideal karma” as completely compatible with “vote your belief.”
I think there are two fairly different questions here:
Should your vote include your beliefs about how much you want other people to see a given post, or what you think is best for others?
Should you vote based on your ideal total-karma for a post
It so happens I think we might disagree about both of them (and disagree about what the best interpretation of the current rules are about them). But, those are quite different questions, and you can do the second based entirely on your own preferences/beliefs.
When a post is at 50, I can think that is a bit too high just from my general sense of what I want to see more of on the site. And it’s be throwing away information about my own beliefs to not give me the fine-gradation of “I want to see these posts on the site about as often as I would if they got 50 karma, not the amount that I would if they got 200 karma.”
This is true when the equilibrium position of the karma system is set to Total Karma Voting.
I think that Blind voting would move the karma system to a new equilibrium. I’m not convinced we should do so as I think it would be a fairly unstable equilibrium but I think it would work if everyone did it and would allow for fine grained expressions of your belief.
The equilibrium I envisage would be that the current amount of something that LW has is taken into account when people blind vote their opinion.
As an example, I think the reason that joke comments can get fairly high karma is that they’re rare. If more people start writing joke comments as a result then that’s fine for as long as people are upvoting.
At some point the people who value the jokes least stop upvoting them or start downvoting them. This continues until the reward experienced by the jokers roughly matches the effort taken or some other balancing factor.
In the case of low positive value posts, some people have a higher threshold for what they will give an upvote for and the more low positive value posts there are the fewer people will upvote them.
(I think its important to note here that we are not really that homogenous in our opinions and weightings of different sources of value. Alot of the worries about Blind voting seem to assume that we’re all going to vote the same way about the same posts which I think is highly unrealistic. There also seems to be the assumption that everything fractionally above 0 value will get an upvote which again seems unrealistic. Frankly I think that anyone who can write a post which is good enough that it persuades 100 different people with different standards to click the upvote button then they deserve to get 150 karma!)
The key then is that in order to get an oversized reward for the amount of effort put in, you have to do better than average at providing value.
In Blind Voting, accounting-for-how-much-of-a-certain-thing-there-currently-is-on-LW is doing the same thing as considering-what-message-the-total-karma-sends does with Total Karma Voting. The former seems to have a lag in the message getting out but I think when you’re in a rough equilibrium the lag is relatively short.
So this brings me onto what I think the main cost of Total karma voting is. If an author looks at a post which has 25 karma from 10 votes, what does it mean? Roughly speaking it means that it was considered about as valuable as another 25 karma post. The 10 votes tells the author how efficient the karma market was for the post and possibly gives limited information on how varied the opinions were.
With Blind voting the author sees that and knows that 10 people had an opinion that this post was wanted more or less and that their average strength of opinion was 2.5 karma points in favour. This probably consists of something like 3 people who want alot more like it and 7 people who want a little more like it (or possibly some who wish there was less like it or were just yay/booing).
I agree that karma is a kludge and the true meaning isn’t necessarily clear but with Blind voting it seems importantly less of a kludge and some extra information can be extracted.
Agreed. I was looking for a shorthand way of referring to the different voting policies but am yet to find one which is satisfactory—you’ve (rightly) shot down a couple of my ideas! Total Karma voting seems fine for one policy, maybe direct opinion voting for the other? If you shoot that one down too you can come up with your own!
I think “blind voting” captures the distinction better – the key difference is whether you’re supposed to look at or model the outcome.
Btw another reason I think “take total karma into account” is important is because of how big a slap downvotes feel like. Blind voting both means that “mildly good comments” will get like 80 karma, but also means that mildly bad comments will get like −80 karma, which would make the site feel very punishing.
I do think that it would be very bad if this happened. However I don’t think this is likely. Quoting my other comment:
This seems even more true for downvotes—I think people realise that downvotes feel extra bad and only use them sparingly. For instance, I only really downvote when I think something has been a definite breaking of a conversational norm or if someone is doubling down on an argument which has been convincingly refuted.
I think a spread of opinions on what constitutes a downvote (and a general feeling that comments get less votes in general) would make the −80 only happen to super egregiously bad comments.
It seems the definition of abuse of Strong Upvotes is about a person using them all the time. You could say that if a person uses Strong votes more then X% of the time they vote the impact of their Strong votes gets reduced.
Adjusting in the other direction seems useful as well. If someone Strong Upvotes ten times less frequently than average I would want to see their strong upvote as worth somewhat more.
There’s a hypothetical direction we could go where voting-weight is determined based on your vote frequency. The main disadvantage of this is that it becomes a lot harder to predict and conceptualize what voting does.
One hesitation habryka had about penalizing excessive strong downvotes is people would end up trying to conserve them as a resource, like a videogame where you end up hoarding all your potions because you “might need them some day” and never actually use them.