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army1987 comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have seen people mention two algorithms to decide whether to upvote or downvote a comment: 1) upvote/downvote it if you'd like to see more/fewer comments like that, and 2) assign it a karma score you think it deserves, look at its current karma, and upvote/downvote it if the former is above/below the latter. I've recently thought about a compromise: 3) assign it a karma score you think it deserves, multiply its current karma by a, and upvote/downvote it if the former is above/below the latter. Note that 3) reduces to 1) as a approaches 0 and to 2) as a approaches 1. (I'm using a = 0.5.)
Does this have any obvious drawback that neither 1) nor 2) has?
I wager that most people don't use an algorithm beyond "I feel like upvoting/downvoting this comment", they just click and then explain/rationalize their actions.
Yeah, but still, do they look at the karma score when deciding that?
My first filter is how I feel about the comment, and my second is a check on whether its karma level looks reasonable to me.
Same here. If it is already downvoted, the signal that "this is not a valuable comment" is already there, thus there is less reason (maybe no reason?) for me to add a downvote. Downvoting an already downvoted comment just seems like punishment, which I am not a fan of.
If everyone follows this policy then all it serves to do is discard most of the information that karma is intended to communicate. Comments that would be voted to -1 with voting as it is currently done would be indistinguishable from comments that nearly everyone downvotes. The -1 comment author is left unsure whether on net merely one person disapproved or whether he is making an extreme faux pas. Observers are left with the same information, if appearences matter. The -1 represents something far more significant than it does now. To the extent that punishment is involved at all the punishment has merely been redistributed along with uncertainty.
There's already uncertainty. A comment that 1 person has downvoted will look identical to a comment that 24 people have upvoted & 25 have downvoted. If the system was designed differently, for example by showing how many upvotes & downvotes individually a comment has received, then your criticism would make more sense to me. Please let me know if I'm misreading you.
There is more uncertainty. Significantly more. I was careful to use 'net' so as not to be commenting on what seems to be the distinct issue of displaying up and down votes separately.
Can't speak for others, but my guess is that some do and some don't, and those who do may or may not use the equalization approach 2. Maybe someone should consider making a list of testable models.
I do something a little like your (2), except that I don't downvote comments that I think deserve a positive score, and vice versa.