All of Dan B's Comments + Replies

There are a whole lot of social networks out there, each with its own rules and karma system. I wonder if anyone has done a survey of what works and what doesn't?

More specifically: for the past few years I've had an account at rpg.stackexchange.com. I've found that this site performs its function remarkably well. When I read questions on this site, I feel motivated to write clear, helpful, somewhat-researched answers.

There are lots of other social networks. Reddit comes immediately to mind. I think slashdot has put a lot of effort into ... (read more)

2habryka
I've definitely done a lot of personal case-studies of all the major platforms, but haven't gotten around to writing up my thoughts yet. I've also been reading through this book, which is quite good and analyzes quite a few existing systems and paradigms: https://smile.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communities-Evidence-Based/dp/0262016575?sa-no-redirect=1

Let me say that a little more clearly:

Someone might argue that "the commentariat on LesserWrong are a group of people who are more nitpicky and less helpful than my friends on Facebook". I'm not sure if this is a strawman.

But I'd like to propose, instead, that the comments being posted on LesserWrong are the result of people responding to incentives imposed by the karma system. For whatever reason, it appears that these incentives are leading people to post nitpicky and unhelpful comments. Improving the karma system might fix the inc... (read more)

9habryka
I do think the karma system is contributing to this, and I do want to explore ways to modify that. I am happy about more suggestions to do so. I am skeptical of the owner of a post marking comments as "helpful" or "unhelpful" since this gives people who write top-level posts suddenly drastically more power than people who don't, even at similar levels of karma. I do think that giving moderators or very-high-karma users the ability to special-upvote or special-downvote something might work out (we've been planning on adding karma rewards to the moderator toolkit for a while now, and think this can indeed be used to combat this problem).

This behavior of writing a post and getting unhelpful comments: is it something that can be changed by tweaking the karma system?

Like, right now, if I read a post and think of a true-but-unhelpful objection, maybe I post the objection in the hope of getting upvotes.

But maybe if you make the post author's upvotes worth more than upvotes by random schmoes, then I optimize more for posting things the post author will like?

8Qiaochu_Yuan
The karma system is not really the problem; tweaking it won't fix the underlying trust dynamics (the thing Raemon was talking about re: high, medium, and low trust). On Facebook, the people who comment on my statuses are typically my friends, or at least acquaintances. We've met in real life, we know and like each other, we're all using our real names, etc. It feels like we're on the same team and so it's easy for us to be helpful and supportive of each other while commenting. Here many people are using pseudonyms, I don't know who they are, we've never met, we're not friends, we plausibly wouldn't like each other even if we met, etc. It's easy for us to relate to each other in a more adversarial way, because it doesn't feel like we're on the same team.
6Dan B
Let me say that a little more clearly: Someone might argue that "the commentariat on LesserWrong are a group of people who are more nitpicky and less helpful than my friends on Facebook". I'm not sure if this is a strawman. But I'd like to propose, instead, that the comments being posted on LesserWrong are the result of people responding to incentives imposed by the karma system. For whatever reason, it appears that these incentives are leading people to post nitpicky and unhelpful comments. Improving the karma system might fix the incentives. You've suggested elsewhere that the post owner might move irrelevant comments to an "off-topic" section, and that's a good way to deal with off-topic comments. But what if a comment is directly replying to my post, but I just sort of feel like it's nitpicky and unhelpful? I could mark it as "off-topic", but this wouldn't be strictly accurate. Instead, I'd propose letting the post owner mark certain comments as "helpful", which would be worth +10 karma, or would double the value of all karma received, or it would sort those posts to the top where more people would see them, or something.