What if we could score on a power-law level of quality, instead of just five stars for fulfilling each of five categories? There could be one order of magnitude for “well written/thought out”, the next order of magnitude higher meaning “has become part of my world model” and one higher of “implemented the recommendations in this post, positively improved my life”. The potential issue I see in the 5 star rating system is that it doesn’t have enough variance; probably 95% of the posts I’ve read on here would be either 4 or 5 stars. Being able to rate posts with a decimal, so you can rate a post 4.5 instead of just 4 or 5, would also help, though it’d clutter the UI and make voting cost more spoons.
In my personal experience, a single post’s karma already operates as a logarithmic measure of quality. It takes more than twice as much effort to write a 100 karma post compared to a 50 karma post.
I agree with the expectation that many posts/comments would be nearly indistinguishable on a five-star scale. I’m not sure there’s a way around this while keeping most of the desirable properties of having a range of options, though perhaps increasing it from 10 options (half-stars) to 14 or 18 options would help.
My basic thought is that if I can see a bunch of 4.5 star posts, I don’t really need the signal as to whether one is 4.3 stars vs 4.7 stars, even if 4.7 is much harder to achieve. I, as a reader, mostly just want a filter for bad/mediocre posts, and the high-end of the scale is just “stuff I want to read”. If I really want to measure difference, I can still see which are more uncontroversially good, and also which has more gratitude.
I’m not sure how a power-law system would work. It seems like if there’s still a fixed scale, you’re marking down a number of zeroes instead of a number of stars. …Unless you’re just suggesting linear voting (ie karma)?
One of my ideas for this (when thinking about voting systems in general) is to have a rating that is trivially inconvenient to access. Like, you have a ranking system from F to A, but then you can also hold the A button for 10 seconds, and then award an S rank, and then you can hold the S button for 30 seconds, and award a double S rank, and then hold it for a full minute, and then award a triple S rank.
The only instance I’ve seen of something like this implemented is Medium’s clap system, which allows you to give up to 50 claps, but you do have to click 50 times to actually give those claps.
If we were making just a small change to voting, then the one I would have liked to make is having something like the clap system instead of weakvotes and strongvotes, and have the cap decided by karma score (as it is now, if your strongvote is X, your cap would be X).
What if we could score on a power-law level of quality, instead of just five stars for fulfilling each of five categories? There could be one order of magnitude for “well written/thought out”, the next order of magnitude higher meaning “has become part of my world model” and one higher of “implemented the recommendations in this post, positively improved my life”. The potential issue I see in the 5 star rating system is that it doesn’t have enough variance; probably 95% of the posts I’ve read on here would be either 4 or 5 stars. Being able to rate posts with a decimal, so you can rate a post 4.5 instead of just 4 or 5, would also help, though it’d clutter the UI and make voting cost more spoons.
In my personal experience, a single post’s karma already operates as a logarithmic measure of quality. It takes more than twice as much effort to write a 100 karma post compared to a 50 karma post.
I agree with the expectation that many posts/comments would be nearly indistinguishable on a five-star scale. I’m not sure there’s a way around this while keeping most of the desirable properties of having a range of options, though perhaps increasing it from 10 options (half-stars) to 14 or 18 options would help.
My basic thought is that if I can see a bunch of 4.5 star posts, I don’t really need the signal as to whether one is 4.3 stars vs 4.7 stars, even if 4.7 is much harder to achieve. I, as a reader, mostly just want a filter for bad/mediocre posts, and the high-end of the scale is just “stuff I want to read”. If I really want to measure difference, I can still see which are more uncontroversially good, and also which has more gratitude.
I’m not sure how a power-law system would work. It seems like if there’s still a fixed scale, you’re marking down a number of zeroes instead of a number of stars. …Unless you’re just suggesting linear voting (ie karma)?
One of my ideas for this (when thinking about voting systems in general) is to have a rating that is trivially inconvenient to access. Like, you have a ranking system from F to A, but then you can also hold the A button for 10 seconds, and then award an S rank, and then you can hold the S button for 30 seconds, and award a double S rank, and then hold it for a full minute, and then award a triple S rank.
The only instance I’ve seen of something like this implemented is Medium’s clap system, which allows you to give up to 50 claps, but you do have to click 50 times to actually give those claps.
If we were making just a small change to voting, then the one I would have liked to make is having something like the clap system instead of weakvotes and strongvotes, and have the cap decided by karma score (as it is now, if your strongvote is X, your cap would be X).