The current karma system tracks one number for each user. This number is used both as an indicator of "is this user's writing worth paying attention to" and as a voting weight (using the new powers-of-five system). I think this is hugely broken and splitting these two apart could make the karma system more effective and also simpler in some sense.
One important way in which the current system is broken is that it forces a painful tradeoff between wanting to easily delegate moderation power (which should ideally have a more local scope, and be used up rather than taken away), but also wanting to conservatively signal the importance of contributions (which should include both positive and negative votes over long time horizons).
I expect the idea to not be taken seriously enough, but meh sometimes I just feel like trying anyway. Here go some (tentative) rules of how such as system could work:
- "voting" is a transaction that takes some positive amount X of dynamic karma from one user, and to another user gives:
- upvote: X amount of static karma, as well as X (for some ) of dynamic karma
- downvote: -X amount of static karma, no change in dynamic karma
- every user's dynamic and static karma is the lifetime sum of what they received by being voted on, starting from zero
- however, moderators receive a constant stream of dynamic karma for free (e.g. 50 per day)
- static karma is publicly visible, and dynamic karma is private
- how much dynamic karma to use for a single vote is left to decide by the voter
- the default (one click) could be 1% of currently owned dynamic karma (or 1 if an user has less than 100 karma)
- it should probably be capped at some fixed value to reduce abuse (e.g. max 10 points per post and 5 per comment, coming from the same account)
- if a moderator is not using their dynamic karma, then above some value (e.g. 500) their "free" dynamic karma should instead be distributed to the community as "dividends" paid proportionally to (positive) stakes of static karma - this is to prevent stagnation from having not enough karma in circulation
A quick example for :
- M is moderator, A and B are two new users on the site
- M upvotes A's post (+5):
- now A has +5 static (publicly visible karma) and +2.5 dynamic karma in their private account
- A likes B's comment, and upvotes it twice:
- now A has +5 static and +0.5 dynamic
- B has +2 static and +1 dynamic
- B upvotes A's reply:
- A has +6 static, +1 dynamic
- B has +2 static, 0 dynamic
- actually turns out both A and B were sock puppets of a spammer, who tries to again upvote between the two accounts. A has one dynamic karma left to upvote B:
- A has +6 static, 0 dynamic
- B has +3 static, 0.5 dynamic
- that's it, there's nothing more the spammer can do until someone else upvotes them (bringing in external karma)
- indeed, no individual (or clique) can increase their static karma more than 100% above the amount they were trusted with by other users, regardless of how many accounts they open
- also as a price for trying to cheat they lose moderation power, which seems fair game
I like this idea. Ultimately the primary constraint on almost any feature on LessWrong is UI complexity, and so there is a very strong prior against any specific passing the very high bar to make it into the final UI, but this is a pretty good contender.
I am particularly interested in more ideas for communicating this to the user in a way that makes intuitive sense, and that they can understand with existing systems and analogies they are already familiar with.
The other big constraint on UI design are hedonic-gradients. While often a system can be economically optimal, because of hyperbolic discounting and naive reinforcement learning, you often end up with really bad equilibria if one of the core interactions on your site is not fun to use. This in particular limits the degree to which you can force the user to spend a limited number of resources, since it both strongly increases mental overhead (instead of just asking themselves "yay or nay?" after reading a comment, they now need to reason about their limited budget and compare it to alternative options), and because people hate spending limited resources (which results in me having played through 4 final fantasy games, and only using two health potions in over 200 hours of gameplay, because I really hate giving up limited resources, and I might really need them in the next fight, even though I never, ever will).