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DanArmak comments on The Trickle-Down Effect of Good Communities - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: lukeprog 08 January 2011 03:58PM

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Tags: karma facebook applications

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Comment author: DanArmak 08 January 2011 04:55:21PM 5 points [-]

There are several problems with your suggestion:

  1. As XiXiDu's comment implies, if the system were taken seriously, it would likely be swamped by people's most strongly held opinions - politics, religion, etc. Karma granted due to political affiliation (and status) would have strongly motivated and well organized people behind it.
  2. LW has central themes to its posts, and widely accepted standards of commenting (e.g. no ad hominem). If a wider community that doesn't adhere to any such rules, and whose discourse is at the typical Facebook level, tried to use a karma system, then karma votes due to "I hate this person" would dominate votes due to "I hate what this person just did today".
  3. Voting only on people (or their profiles) would be much less useful than voting on individual comments (or on actions that people do in their daily lives), due to the above two reasons. Also, even a large fluctuation (say, +-50 karma) due to one day's actions would not be easily visible if it was small compared to a person's total karma (say, 5000).
  4. There would also be the usual problems with spamming, sock puppets, etc.
Comment author: lukeprog 08 January 2011 05:02:34PM 2 points [-]

DanArmak,

Yes, there are lots of obvious problems with such a 'real-life karma system', and that is why I did not pursue it further: I don't know how to solve those problems.

That said, Wikipedia has tons of problems in theory, but it works in practice. Either the theoretically fatal problems didn't pan out, or somebody figured out a way around them. Maybe somebody could do the same for a Facebook karma system, maybe not. In any case, I don't know how to get around such problems, and that's why I named my post after the trickle-down effect, not after a Facebook karma system that was proposed as an afterthought.

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