Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things - all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work - but they have 0 karma to show for it.
We can fix this by having karma be multiplied when it is donated. So if I donate 100 karma to see some task completed that will reward the person who does that task with 200 karma. Another idea (that I prefer) is that the karma bounty you post is returned to you (as well as given to the other person) when a task is completed.
Also, there should probably be more incentives for gaining karma in general, as there are incentives for gaining upload ratio on what.cd. Rising through the karma ranks should give users special privileges that are actually desired.
On stackexchange style sites users are awarded with the power to do site admin tasks as a reward for tasking the karma ladder. For instance 2000 karma nets you the ability to edit others post (helpfully correcting broken links). Obviously there are still consequences if you use your powers for evil.
Independent of modifications to the karma system, more users should be given such editting powers. In particular the sequences could do with being more interlinked, and I would happily do this given the chance. Putting links to the next post in the sequence at the end of every post would increase their addictiveness substantially, pulling in more readers.
Finally, it occurs that making such modifications might use more work than simply making the changes that would otherwise have rewards posted for them.
Yes! Stackexchange/overflow is really well designed. There are many things which LW (and for that matter other most community sites) could learn from SE. Editing posts is a good one. They also do a really good job of making tags work well. We have a couple of editors but we could really use more.
Currently, LWers get +1 karma for a comment upvote, and +10 karma for a main post upvote. But clearly, there are other valuable things LWers could do for the community besides writing comments and posts. Writing isn't everyone's forte. Why not award karma for doing productive non-writing things? It's probably not optimal that karma and the community status that comes with it are awarded only for the thing that myself and a few other people are good at. For example, I really wish LW could award karma to programmers for improving LW.
The challenge is doing it fairly, in a way that doesn't alienate too many people. But there might be a workable way to do this, so let's explore.
Perhaps tasks could be assigned karma award amounts by LW editors (Nesov, Eliezer, Louie, etc.), or even just one person who is appointed as the Karma Genie.
Examples: