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PhilGoetz comments on How to incentivize people doing useful stuff on Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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Are there people willing to purchase LessWrong karma with Second Life dollars, World of Warcraft money, or even real US dollars?
If it were possible to sell LessWrong karma for a dollar a point, some people could quit their jobs and write for LessWrong full time.
One problem is that this would in itself probably devalue karma against the dollar.
An alternate system would be to add another button next to 'thumbs up' that would use paypal to pay people a dollar directly for a clever comment or $5 for a post.
(This raises an interesting question: Would the karma system be more informative if we had no downvotes? As it stands, a karma of +/- 2 is usually a strong signal; but for a controversial comment, that doesn't rise above the noise.)
If Karma were worth any money worth worrying about, then the fact that Karma is an easily gamed system would quickly become a problem.
LW Karma is in all objectivity worth less than a dollar a point. You can earn twenty karma just for a statement being particularly witty even if it's fairly obvious to the clever in the context of the post made, such as saying "I'm not!" in response to a post characterizing LWers as contrarian. Then we're asking where the money comes from -- singinst can't have that kind of money in its coffers, they're not just going to ship $100 to anyone who's lurked on the site long enough to rack up a hundred points. At this value I'd peg karma closer to a cent.
The question is the reverse - whether there exist people who would like to get LW karma as an acknowledgment of expected positive effect of their donation to SingInst.
if the downvotes were to be changed, I'd like to see more along the lines of Upvotes/Downvotes/Total Karma. Controversial posts would still have reasonable numbers of up/downs and would be visible thus, but the total karma would reflect the overall feel of the post. This information is all recorded in the db anyway.. Though to be honest, as a standard user I would hardly be interested in this information at this point. so please, make it optional.
Showing more parameters will lead to different perception of post karma, and so it should be separately discussed.
Currently, many people think along the lines "I would upvote it from 2 to 3, but not from 4 to 5, and from 10 I will downvote it to 9". So, even a non-controversial post can accumulate some upvotes and downvotes if some people find it overrated and some find it underrated.