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ciphergoth comments on Open Thread: April 2009 - Less Wrong
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I just stopped myself from commenting on a thread because I was worried for my itty bitty karma score. I'm new, so my karma score is tiny. I'm new enough to know that I might not know all the relevant context, so I stopped myself in case what I was going to say was too obvious.
I wish that newbies could have a protected period from being downvoted to the pits of negative karma if the new person is clearly giving an honest effort. But at the same time, downvoting trolls makes very good sense. I realize it's not practical to separate out new people from potential trolls. So for now, I find that I am being very, very careful.
Nevertheless, do we want the new people to feel the need to be careful? (Yes, I know that other sites do this: I have a decent karma on slashdot. Is it what this site wants?)
Sadly, we do want newcomers to take extra care, and indeed that's pretty much normal - for example, it's usually good to lurk for a bit in a new community before contributing. It looks like that care is paying off for you, which to me seems to indicate that the karma system has been a success in this instance.
Agreed, the karma system is not fundamentally flawed (I realize that there's further discussion on the karma system, like over here ). Maybe the karma system is a little frustrating because it does force the new person to be careful, but a bit of frustration now to improve the latter dialogue makes sense.
I just wanted to know that that was the intention here, not an accidental (if beneficial) by-product of the karma system.
I guess that makes me the counter-point. We will see how it goes. Normally I take much more care before contributing but I feel that karma is an easier way to feel the community.
That being said, I am not planning on being pointedly disrespectful just to test the waters. I do think I have interesting things to say. Karma just lets me know if the community agrees. If, in a week, everything I say is ignored or voted down, I take it as evidence I need to change something.