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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Voiceofra is banned - Less Wrong
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Think about how much effort everyone spends talking about karma, and trying to fix karma, and protect karma from abuse. Is all that effort worth it for the low signal karma provides? Who cares about amassing internet points, let quality speak for itself.
Suppose some comment thread has a thousand comments. Without a karma system (as e.g. on Slate Star Codex), I can either waste several hours reading them all, or quickly scroll the page looking for something catching my eye and hope I don't miss something interesting. With a karma system, I can entrust the readership with the task of telling me which comments are the most worth reading, and read them first.
Entrusting the readership to tell you what's good is what you want the karma system to do, but it's not what the karma system is actually doing. Aside from sockpuppets, tribal voting, etc., it's just not possible to generate good recommendation systems from karma systems (otherwise everyone would be doing it). Even more sophisticated "recursive" systems like pagerank don't really work due to collusion, link farms (sockpuppets, basically), and related issues. Google moved away to a more complex system and has a full time police force to try to make the more complex thing work due to the constant threat of sabotage.
I think in practice you have to go by name or direct judgement of content. Karma gives you an illusion of a rank, but it's a pretty terrible rank.
Slatestar's comment system has lots of other problems aside from lacking karma, that make it difficult to follow what's happening.
Yes, but it's not as terrible as ranking comments chronologically.
That's a false dilemma. You don't have to rank comments either chronologically or karmically. You can just look at what the comments say (or go by name, if people made a name for themselves). In other words, have a you-specific karma in your own brain.
I mean what did we expect, it's not so easy to have a ranking of quality.
At least chronological order is objective, karma's reliability is inversely proportional to how busy the idiots are.
I don't always have that much time on my hands.
Well, you know what they say, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.