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Morendil comments on Please do not downvote every comment or post someone has ever made as a retaliation tactic. - Less Wrong Discussion

39 Post author: Will_Newsome 21 August 2011 12:35PM

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Comment author: Morendil 21 August 2011 02:32:18PM *  7 points [-]

Quoting Eliezer:

One of my ever-pending posts to write is on what sort of simple interface might prevent online arguments from retracing the same points over and over. I suspect it will not be graphical with boxes, because that makes poor use of screen real estate. I suspect it will not have lots of fancy argument types and patterns, because no one really uses that stuff. I think it does need to have a karma system, because otherwise there's no way to find the good stuff.

The basic rationale is filtering; the current system is satisficing, given some reasonable assumptions as to how online communities work, and has the "feature" of being inherited from a successful web site and thus being a "proven solution" rather than something speculative designed from scratch.

The major issue with LW's current karma system is information cascades; that has been acknowledged almost from the start of LW. Yet solutions intended to correct this have not been widely adopted.