MarkusRamikin comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 September 2007 08:05PM

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Comment author: Grognor 30 October 2011 12:49:58PM 4 points [-]

It goes along a little bit with joke comments, if you follow. I can't for-sure know what the motivations behind any given post are (surely some motivation is to receive karma even on good comments), but strong warning signs that a comment was posted mostly to receive karma include, roughly in order of strong indicators to weak indicators:

  • comment is very short
  • comment includes an emoticon
  • comment is intended as humor
  • comment that expresses reasons for having a belief that everyone at Less Wrong already has
  • comment has little actual content compared to number of words
  • (related to previous point) comment has no content except agreeing/disagreeing
  • comment has signals of pseudo-modesty such as, "perhaps", "maybe", "I think", "it seems", "possibly", etc.
  • comment is pure speculation
  • comment is made after previous ones, where an edit to a previous comment would have been appropriate (users cannot upvote a single comment multiple times, but multiple comments by a single author are fair play)
  • comment mentions karma
  • comment speaks in passive voice

Multiple items on this list prime me for down-voting behavior.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 01 November 2011 12:43:46PM 2 points [-]

Thanks and upvoted. Since reading this subthread (and that post you linked to) I've noted a significant increase in my willingness to downvote, and it's partly because I started noticing more of what you're talking about.

Although... I'm not in any important disagreement with you, but I'd rather make it clear that I don't think there's anything shameful about wanting and enjoying karma. After all, the point of karma is that it's supposed to motivate people, else why have a karma system? It's more that, regardless of what motivated a poster to write it, a post with no content (or otherwise not worth seeing) is a bad thing. All the other symptoms you mention just make me pay closer attention to whether a post has meaningful content.

When I put myself in the shoes of someone criticised for making one of those posts, I think it'd feel more fair to be told what was objectively wrong with the post itself, than to just be accused of karma-whoring; what could you possibly say to that, even if the accusation were in error?

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