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rocurley comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I sometimes run into a situation where I see a comment I'm ambivalent about about, that I would normally not vote on. However, this comment also has an extreme vote total, either very high or very low. I would prefer this comment to be more like 0, but I'm not sure it's acceptable to vote according to what I want the total to be, as opposed to what I think about the post, because it gives me more voting power than I would otherwise have. What do you do in this situation?
You get to modify the karma rating by one in either direction. Do so in whatever manner seems most desirable to you.
You have too much voting power if you create a sock puppet and vote twice.
This is my attempt to figure out what is most desirable to me. At the moment, I want to do whatever would be the best overall policy if everyone followed it, with "best" here being defined as "resulting in the best lesswrong possible" (with a very complicated definition of best that I don't think I can specify well).
Given that that's what I want, how best to achieve it? The karma system is valuable because it makes more visible posts that are highly upvoted, so it's valuable to the extent that the highest upvoted comments are the best.
It should be noted that only relative karma matters (for sorting within an article), and the karma of other posts will tend to be rising (most posts wind up with positive karma). There is some number between 0 and 1 (call it x)that represents the expected vote of someone who votes.
Because karma is relative, if you've decide you care enough to vote, you should subtract x from your vote to determine if it counts as evidence that the post is good or bad. Do you want to vote 1-x, -x, or -1-x? Note 1-x>0, and the other two (not voting and down voting) are less than 0, downvoting by quite a bit. Which of these best corresponds to the sentiment "I liked this but think it's overrated"?
I roughly follow the following (prioritized) rules:
Up-vote if I want to see more posts like this/down-vote if I don't want to see more posts like this, regardless of the current total.
A comment that I do not feel very strongly about I may up- or down-vote based on what total karma I expect the comment of this kind to deserve.
Very occasionally, I might like or dislike the author for unrelated reasons, and decide to up-/down-vote based on that.
I have previous thought that maybe karma should be hidden until after you vote.
But then there's the problem where part of the point of karma is to tell you whether something is worth reading. If karma was hidden until after voting, users would still have their total karma to motivate them, and we could still hide sufficiently negative comments.
Maybe we should hide comment karma before voting, but not article karma?
You should vote without knowledge of total karma, otherwise it biases comments' karma scores towards 0 (except at extremes, where it creates bandwagon effects). Power doesn't enter into it, though.
You're assuming that biasing karma scores towards zero (relative to what they would be before) is bad. Sure, it could be, but I don't see any particular reason why.
[citation needed]
Does your preference mean that you honestly think the intrinsic value of the comment does not justify its vote count, or that you just generally prefer moderation and extremes irritate you?
In the former case, I would definitely vote toward what I thought would be a more justified vote count. Though in the latter case, I would probably be completely blind to my bias.
I meant that the intrinsic value of the comment does not justify its vote count.