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Konkvistador comments on Negative karma is a bad design - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
I disagree strongly.
Why? Because we will run out of bits?
I disagree. There is a useful distinction to be made between someone starting out at 0 karma or just breaking even and someone running a negative score.
There is, but my point was that you can't make this useful distinction usefully.
I recall there have been a few posters who have cycled accounts to make top-level posts, but I think this declined dramatically after the karma minimum for posting went up. So probably a pretty low-priority, but I agree there is an incentive problem (depending on how attached people are to their accounts).
Because we end up with loads of fake accounts which just add noise to the stats of the site for example.
So far no one has done an analysis on the data set of all registered accounts.
This. And This
And This
It's proposed to spend coding resources solving a hypothetical "problem" for newbies whose first posts result in negative karma.
Have we determined that this is a problem for any significant number of people?
Moreover, with all the squawk about signal to noise, shouldn't we want to cause problems for such people? The negative karma imposed some cost on the guy. Why is that a bad thing?
And note how this "fix" would mask a troll, making his karma indistinguishable from a complete newbie. That's a more serious theoretical issue than some newbie in a tizzy over how he would wipe out his -2 karma and start again from scratch.
This nonfix "solves" a trivial problem for a set of users we probably want to cause more problems for, and introduces a serious hole for trolls.
Bad idea.
Total karma scores still don't display below zero, although monthly karma scores do. If you want to know whether a person's karma score is zero or negative, and if so, how negative, you have to look at the scores on their comments. The current system is designed to make negative karma a burden that keeps people from posting beyond a brief reversal in conduct, without publicly displaying just how much the person in question has been downvoted.
Odd. Why should the community be in the dark about a negative karma score?
That's one thing about requirements: what the requirement is let's you build it, why the requirement is let's you maintain it.
As far as I know it's to discourage people from aiming for negative karma, and taking pride in how much they've been downvoted - as proof of their trolling or brave thinking out of the box or willingness to "tell truth to power" or whatever. I think that happened a few times.
(it's a bit like how sometimes punishing a misbehaving child can actually be "rewarding him with attention", and result in more frequent misbehaving)
Interesting. Everything is a tradeoff. When people aren't alerted to a troll, there's a cost, and when they are, there's another cost.
Is there any mechanism for booting a troll?
Essentially, no. If I recall Alicorn has to delete individual comments rather than ban users... more by oversight than design. As far as I'm aware Eliezer hasn't got a "boot troll" feature available to him either. Matt would... via an SQL UPDATE if nothing else.
Admins have the power to delete posts and comments, and probably users (though I can't think of a time it happened); I wouldn't be surprised if that was used mostly to fight spammers, not trolls.
I don't know why negative karma scores aren't displayed. I vaguely recall the matter being discussed back when the system was implemented, but I don't remember the reasoning behind it, if I was ever privy to it in the first place.
I have seen a few, e.g. this one. And accurate user number statistics are handy for measuring LW growth and the impact of various changes.
That is the data set of "the accounts that google can find".
Good thing LessWrong cares only about the past and nobody is interested in anything that might happen in the future :p
And anyway this is not the only reason, you can easily argue (I am doing it right now) that it is better for a site to have less fake accounts. It might be just slightly better but it is not very hard to implement a fix anyway so we might as well implement it and make this place slightly better.
A word from a cranky tech professional: unless you are personally capable of making a change to a system, make no assumptions as to how easy or hard it is to implement.
Wise words. I should've said '..if it is not very hard to implement a fix we might as well...'
It's reasonable to conclude "if this is a potential problem, and it's easy to solve, we should implement that solution assuming the solution does not cause other problems." But negative karma was deliberately implemented to keep disruptive individuals from continually posting after being heavily downvoted. To my knowledge, while there are people who've created sockpuppet accounts, the issue of someone creating a sockpuppet to get around negative karma has not yet come up (and if it has, the people doing it managed to create a sufficiently clean break from their earlier records that their taking up new handles was probably for the best.) On the other hand, people who've been regularly disruptive and had their posting throttled by negative karma is an issue that has come up before.