From my informal understanding of human psychology these changes will make karma much more strongly desired. I don't think a spiral around karma is what we want; much more importance on karma, in fact, and we might see something analogous to what search-engine optimisation is doing to internet content.
Incidentally, what is search-engine optimization doing to internet content? I've noticed machine-generated non-content scoring pretty highly on searches, is that what you're referring to? Or are there more subtle, pernicious effects I'm not entirely aware of?
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!