After this and the previous experiments on jessicata’s top level posts, I’d like to propose that these experiments aren’t actually addressing the problems with the karma system: the easiest way to get a lot of karma on LessWrong is to post a bunch (instead of working on something alignment related), and the aggregate data is kinda meaningless and adding more axis doesn’t fix this. The first point is discussed at length on basically all sites that use upvote/downvotes (here’s one random example from reddit I pulled from Evernote), but the second isn’t. Given an example post, what does it mean that, say, 15 people upvoted it and 3 people downvoted it?
It means nothing.
There is an assumption that this aggregation actually is useful to the user and I’d like to push back on that. Even ignoring sockpuppeting (hi Eugene) and offsite brigading (hi [REDACTED]), how is a total score of “12” supposed to help me? How does a score of 12 predict whether I’d like this comment or not? Adding a separate agree/disagree sum (like on jessicata’s posts) or a set of additional tags (like here) doesn’t address this.
Here’s a more interesting experiment that’s admittedly much more disruptive and difficult to pull off: leave the upvote/downvote buttons, but completely hide total karma scores entirely from the user. Then do something like surface the comments in the order that LessWrong predicts the viewing user will upvote/take no action/downvote. My downvote might uprank a comment for someone else, making voting more valuable for everyone. This still feels vaguely Goodheart-y and is more of a starting point, but seems much more valuable than the current system.
I don’t think it’s a problem that people can get karma by posting a bunch? The only reward a user gets for having tons of karma is that their votes are worth a bit more; I don’t know the exact formula, but I don’t expect it to be so egregious that it would be worth farming karma for.
And it’s certainly not the intention on the content-agnostic Less Wrong website that alignment posts should somehow be privileged over other content; that’s what the alignment forum is there for.
As I understand it, just like on Reddit, the primary goal of the karma system is for content discoverability—highly upvoted content stays on the frontpage for longer and is seen by more people; and similarly, highly upvoted comments are sorted above less upvoted comments. Upvoting something means stuff like “I like this”, “I agree with this”, “I want more people to see this”, etc. However, this breaks down when people e.g. want to indicate their appreciation (like an act of courage of speaking out), even if they believe the content is low quality or something. In that case, it seems like one voting axis is obviously not enough.
I understand that sockpuppeting and vote manipulation is a big problem on Reddit, but why do you think it is a relevant problem on LW? I’d expect this kind of thing to only become an important problem if LW were to get orders of magnitude more users.
The only reward a user gets for having tons of karma is that their votes are worth a bit more
The only formal reward. A number going up is its own reward to most people. This causes content to tend closer to consensus: content people write becomes a Keynesian beauty contest over how they think people will vote. If you think that Preference Falsification is one of the major issues of our time, this is obviously bad.
why do you think it is a relevant problem on LW?
I mentioned the Eugene Nier case, where a person did Extreme Botting to manipulate the scores of people he didn’t like, which drove away a bunch of posters. (The second was redacted for a reason.)
I hadn’t seen the experiments on Jessicata’s posts before, and I assume others will have not as well, so here’s a link to one of the posts featuring the experiment. (It’s a two-axis thing, with ‘overall’ and ‘agreement’ as the two axes. Part of me prefers that setup to the one used in this experiment)
After this and the previous experiments on jessicata’s top level posts, I’d like to propose that these experiments aren’t actually addressing the problems with the karma system: the easiest way to get a lot of karma on LessWrong is to post a bunch (instead of working on something alignment related), and the aggregate data is kinda meaningless and adding more axis doesn’t fix this. The first point is discussed at length on basically all sites that use upvote/downvotes (here’s one random example from reddit I pulled from Evernote), but the second isn’t. Given an example post, what does it mean that, say, 15 people upvoted it and 3 people downvoted it?
It means nothing.
There is an assumption that this aggregation actually is useful to the user and I’d like to push back on that. Even ignoring sockpuppeting (hi Eugene) and offsite brigading (hi [REDACTED]), how is a total score of “12” supposed to help me? How does a score of 12 predict whether I’d like this comment or not? Adding a separate agree/disagree sum (like on jessicata’s posts) or a set of additional tags (like here) doesn’t address this.
Here’s a more interesting experiment that’s admittedly much more disruptive and difficult to pull off: leave the upvote/downvote buttons, but completely hide total karma scores entirely from the user. Then do something like surface the comments in the order that LessWrong predicts the viewing user will upvote/take no action/downvote. My downvote might uprank a comment for someone else, making voting more valuable for everyone. This still feels vaguely Goodheart-y and is more of a starting point, but seems much more valuable than the current system.
I don’t think it’s a problem that people can get karma by posting a bunch? The only reward a user gets for having tons of karma is that their votes are worth a bit more; I don’t know the exact formula, but I don’t expect it to be so egregious that it would be worth farming karma for.
And it’s certainly not the intention on the content-agnostic Less Wrong website that alignment posts should somehow be privileged over other content; that’s what the alignment forum is there for.
As I understand it, just like on Reddit, the primary goal of the karma system is for content discoverability—highly upvoted content stays on the frontpage for longer and is seen by more people; and similarly, highly upvoted comments are sorted above less upvoted comments. Upvoting something means stuff like “I like this”, “I agree with this”, “I want more people to see this”, etc. However, this breaks down when people e.g. want to indicate their appreciation (like an act of courage of speaking out), even if they believe the content is low quality or something. In that case, it seems like one voting axis is obviously not enough.
I understand that sockpuppeting and vote manipulation is a big problem on Reddit, but why do you think it is a relevant problem on LW? I’d expect this kind of thing to only become an important problem if LW were to get orders of magnitude more users.
The only formal reward. A number going up is its own reward to most people. This causes content to tend closer to consensus: content people write becomes a Keynesian beauty contest over how they think people will vote. If you think that Preference Falsification is one of the major issues of our time, this is obviously bad.
I mentioned the Eugene Nier case, where a person did Extreme Botting to manipulate the scores of people he didn’t like, which drove away a bunch of posters. (The second was redacted for a reason.)
I hadn’t seen the experiments on Jessicata’s posts before, and I assume others will have not as well, so here’s a link to one of the posts featuring the experiment. (It’s a two-axis thing, with ‘overall’ and ‘agreement’ as the two axes. Part of me prefers that setup to the one used in this experiment)