Konkvistador comments on Cleaning up the "Worst Argument" essay - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Yvain 06 September 2012 12:09AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 09 September 2012 11:34:55AM *  5 points [-]

I'm guessing people are printing more karma these days.

I'm not sure I got my point across. Imagine a forum with 100 people, where each individual has a 0.2 probability of giving a post thumbs up. Now imagine a forum with 10 000 people.

Obviously some people won't bother to vote on a heavily voted post they agree or disagree with so this isn't exactly linear. Posts with lots of negative karma are less visible, while well liked posts are more visible. You almost have a floor under which karma won't drop while the the sky is the limit for positive karma.

I think it likely that individual LWers aren't much more generous with karma than they where.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 09 September 2012 11:10:36PM *  1 point [-]

No, I got what you were saying. You attribute it to increasing numbers of users, with constant karma rate.

Maybe it's a timescale thing. I've only been here about a year. To my observational feel, the karma rate has increased a lot in the last couple of months. I don't think my observational clock would have noticed a 10% or 20% increase - more like at least a doubling.

Someone recently posted membership changes per month. I think the increments were around 10%, if that. Now, maybe people are also visiting more too.

Some of my feel is coming from my own posts - 8 karma for that? Really?

Many things could be the cause of my feeling, but I'll bet you a dollar that karma/discussion page hit has gone up in the last 2 months. Not that either of us is likely to collect - the data and therefore the money.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 September 2012 12:56:22AM 0 points [-]

There could be a time delay between a user joining and him voting regularly.