Karma Changes

Eliezer Yudkowsky

As recently (re-)suggested by Kaj Sotala, posts now have much larger effects on karma than comments: Each up or down vote on a post is worth 10 karma.

Negative votes on posts have had karma effects all along, but for some reason Reddit's code imposed a display cap (not an actual cap) of 0. This violates a basic user interface principle: things with important effects should have visible effects. Since this just got 10x more important, we now show negative post totals rather than "0". This also provides some feedback to posters that was previously missing. Note that downvoting a post costs 10 karma from your downvote cap of 4x current karma.

The minimum karma to start posting has been raised to 50.

Thanks to our friends at Tricycle for implementing this request!

As recently (re-)suggested by Kaj Sotala, posts now have much larger effects on karma than comments: Each up or down vote on a post is worth 10 karma.

The minimum karma to start posting has been raised to 50.

Thanks to our friends at Tricycle for implementing this request!

I think this change will prevent people from posting anything even remotely experimental. Is this what we really want?

There's a consistent pattern to what gets voted down.

"Experimental" isn't what gets voted down. Arrogance or confrontation combined with poor thinking/writing gets voted down. If you're making a really big conclusion, you need to make your premises really clear. If you're not confident in your point, or if you're incredibly confident in your point, you should frame your post more as raising a question than answering one. And you need to respect basic rules of grammar and spelling; lesswrong is probably in the top .1% of civility for this type of ... (read more)

7Oscar_Cunningham16y

If someone starts a post with "Rationality is wrong..." or similar, I'm much more likely to downvote it than if they start it with "I've got these scenarios where standard rationality techniques seem not to work..." To this extent at least the presentation of the ideas matters as much as the content. So I hope that these rules will cause people to present their ideas more cautiously, while still posting experimentally. If you are thinking of posting something controversial, it might be worth seeking advice from the other users who you think will be interested. Basically, I think downvotes should work as an "utter stupidity" filter.

2wedrifid16y

You might be right but that tendency would be a result of risk aversion and not anything approximating expected karma optimisation. Assuming reasonable English skills, the ability to proof read and the exposure to the content of this site required to know how the karma works you can expect a significant net karma gain from posts even if you add a lot of experimental noise.