I am a huge fan of tiered-complexity views on complex underlying systems. The description to new users would be:
Ratings are a magic median-like combination of how users rated a post. Click through for more details...
Displayed ratings are the median of how users have rated the post/comment. Smoothed. Weighted by how LessWrongy the rater has been. Your own rating will have more effect when your historical ratings are good predictions of how trusted moderators end up rating. Click through for more details...
Sometimes mods will rate posts/comments, after careful reflection of how they want LessWrong in general to rate. When they do, everyone who previously rated will be awarded additional weight to their future votes if their ratings were similar to what the mod decided, or penalized with less future vote weight if their ratings were pretty far off. That’s how the weights are determined when aggregating people’s votes on comments. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Folks were grandfathered in. New folks [behavior]. Mods who are regularly different than other mods and high-weight voters trigger investigation into whether they should be mods anymore, or whether everyone is getting something wrong. Multiple mod votes are a thing, as is voting similar to high-weight voters (?? maybe ?? is it ??), as is promoting high-weight voters to mods, as is etc etc. Click through for more details, including math...
Another issue I’d highlight is one of complexity. When I consider how much math is involved:
This post involves Gaussians, logarithms, weighted means, integration, and probably a few other things I missed.
The current karma system uses...addition? Sometimes subtraction?
One of these things is much more transparent to new users.
I am a huge fan of tiered-complexity views on complex underlying systems. The description to new users would be:
Ratings are a magic median-like combination of how users rated a post. Click through for more details...
Displayed ratings are the median of how users have rated the post/comment. Smoothed. Weighted by how LessWrongy the rater has been. Your own rating will have more effect when your historical ratings are good predictions of how trusted moderators end up rating. Click through for more details...
Sometimes mods will rate posts/comments, after careful reflection of how they want LessWrong in general to rate. When they do, everyone who previously rated will be awarded additional weight to their future votes if their ratings were similar to what the mod decided, or penalized with less future vote weight if their ratings were pretty far off. That’s how the weights are determined when aggregating people’s votes on comments. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Folks were grandfathered in. New folks [behavior]. Mods who are regularly different than other mods and high-weight voters trigger investigation into whether they should be mods anymore, or whether everyone is getting something wrong. Multiple mod votes are a thing, as is voting similar to high-weight voters (?? maybe ?? is it ??), as is promoting high-weight voters to mods, as is etc etc. Click through for more details, including math...
[treatise]
[link to the documented code]