Emile comments on Negative karma is a bad design - Less Wrong

-9 Post author: sanxiyn 13 December 2012 11:27AM

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Comment author: Emile 13 December 2012 01:26:13PM 11 points [-]

Rather than fixing hypothetical future problems, I would rather have work spent on fixing things that cause problems now, for example:

  • when you click on a permalink to a single comment (like those you find in your mailbox, or in the recent comments), the whole thread it's in is marked as read (and won't be in green any more)

  • There is no way to see the upovote / downvote split on posts and comments, only upvotes minus downvotes (though I'm not sure that would be such an improvement, it's just something a lot of people ask for; there recent "poll" feature may be a better way)

(unless of course you were planning on implementing, testing and submitting the fix yourself!)

Comment author: sanxiyn 13 December 2012 02:17:16PM 7 points [-]
  • This came up on #lesswrong IRC channel, it was not a hypothetical future problem at all.
  • Yes, I was planning on implementing, testing, submitting the fix myself.
Comment author: gwern 14 December 2012 01:27:20AM 6 points [-]

This came up on #lesswrong IRC channel, it was not a hypothetical future problem at all.

Being discussed somewhere does not show it is real. Personally, 'people are cycling from account to account to evade karma limits' doesn't seem like a real problem...

Comment author: TimS 13 December 2012 07:42:05PM *  3 points [-]

Can you be more specific on what you think the problem is?

I agree that the current (downvoting + minimum karma for Discussion) dynamic encourages creating new accounts, holding everything else equal. But I'm not sure what the downside of inflated registered-user numbers is - there's not much sock-puppetry locally, so it isn't clear how additional registrations can be considered relevant to signal-to-noise issues.

And there are tangible benefits to the downvoting system (helps increase quality posts, crowd-sourcing basic moderation).

Comment author: Emile 13 December 2012 04:06:46PM 2 points [-]

Ah, cool!

Then, I have much less to complain about, offers of help are much more useful than suggestions from back seat drivers :)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 December 2012 01:38:25PM 2 points [-]

I agree on both, but I think you should have this as a separate discussion thread.

Comment author: Emile 13 December 2012 04:08:54PM 1 point [-]

Well, though I also don't really want to start a new discussion on these (this kind of meta stuff doesn't add much value to the site), just say "these seem to be things people complain about even more".