I have noticed that starting posts at the poster's karma creates a double counting: I think "Raymond posted this I should read it" and also "This has 3 points I should read it" but it has 3 points because Raymond wrote it. I then notice that it causes me to want to know how many points Raymond gives his initial posts so I can mentally subtract those 3 points and see if anyone else actually endorses this comment, so now I feel low-level pressured to memorize people's karma scores. Which seems bad.
A question I find myself asking is "do people write posts they themselves would not wish to upvote?" I think the answer is yes, e.g. Raymond's "good point, I will fix that" which is a good comment for him to write but which I do not think he would choose to upvote.
I do think that the sorting effect of attaching the person's karma to the comment is actively good and would like to keep it. That could be kept distinct from the displayed score, same way it is kept distinct from the person's karma score.
I also realize that I have a lot of strong preferences in such things, so we might want to consider (non-urgently) putting effort into giving people customization options for display of scores and sorting of comments.
I think the relative weighting is good and if anything is too weak, and I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all. This seems fine since 5 Karma is one good comment, and the system can put your vote in retroactively. If anything it sends the right message that we want to know your opinion but do not yet put any weight on it! During the beta this might have odd effects since it does not appear that Karma has transferred from 1.0 (e.g. my posts on my first day here are starting at 1) so for now we should give everyone at least 1 point.
Inflation worries me a lot, though. As Raymond notes, when I see a 7 I instinctively think of that as 7 people voting up (or 7 more up than down). My brain knows what to think about that. If 20 is the new 7, then every time I see a number I'm doing math to translate back to the scale of people. This is together with the issue that comments start at 1+ rather than 0. The starting at 0 and going up slowly (since downvoting and stinginess) helped with the atmosphere and culture that LW1.0 projected. Each point mattered and getting them was hard and meaningful. It sent the message that one sho
I agree with this. I also think that needing to get 5 karma before voting isn't that discouraging, and the kinds of users it discourages (ones who are too impatient to want to hang out and read stuff before they get to influence where things go; ones who will just lurk forever no matter what; ones who are unusually easily discouraged or unambitious...) might be outweighed by the kinds of users it encourages to comment who otherwise would just lurk. Particularly if the voting requirement is some low, obviously reachable karma level, I could imagine it feeling like a tantalizing prize that would make me want to start commenting.
Also, keeping brand-new users from voting would have some advantages for limiting sockpuppet shenanigans, 'we just got linked from the front page of reddit' mayhem, and the like.
Strong endorsement of the principle that not every potential user is a net positive, and driving away potential new users is not automatically bad. Maximizing views/users/etc too much is a classic trap metric.
I think that principle would apply to 'leaves because they couldn't vote without 5 karma' but could be convinced otherwise by people worth keeping saying 'this would drive me away if I were new.'
Karma currently conflates multiple possible reations into a single datum. An upvote currently could mean "me too" or "I updated" or "I agree" or "others should read this", or "LOL", etc. A downvote could mean "fallacy" or "poor quality" or "disagree", etc. It's hard for posters and readers to discern intent.
Facebook and Github (and probably others) now have a small number of Emoji reactions, instead of just +/- or "Like". This i
What happens if a user with 15 Karma upvotes something, gets to 30 karma, and then removes the upvote? Does it remove the original two karma, or the new three? Or are increases in karma weight retroactive, so your two vote becomes worth three when you reach 25 karma?
Nitpicking a misplaced parenthesis: I think the equation is probably
floor(log_5(karma+1))+1
rather than
floor(log_5(karma)+1)+1
New posts also start with their user having upvoted them once, so if you have 25 karma, you'll start with 3 points.
I have observed that this upvote does not effect the posters karma, this is a good design, but not clear from the text of this post.
Okay, the thoughts that originally prompted me to write this post:
1) Point Inflation - it currently feels weird/wrong to me that I'm getting more points than usual. And then, when I realize that 17 points actually just means maybe 5 people upvoted my post, that feels a little sad. However, this seems like a temporary problem, and over time I'd get used to it.
The new paradigm seems like "3-weight votes" is basically what you'll get as soon as you get the hang of things.
2) Not knowing how many people actually upvoted. I'm not su...
Karma-Weight as Max-Upvote, rather than Standard Upvote
Medium recently implement something called "claps" (see here), where you can basically "like" something as many times as you want. If you like it a lot, "clap" a lot. This is neat because it's somewhat costly signaling - it actually takes time to clap things, there's only so much you'd do it unless something actually seems really good to you.
A possible variation on this is something like "you can upvote something multiple times, and the limit of how much you upvote it is limited by your vote-weight". (So, someone with 25 karma can upvote/downvote something up to 3 times).
This would resolve issue #3 above, and I think might add some additional value as a costlier signal.
If we went this route, there's a few variations. Maybe you let people upvote a lot if it matters to them (which would mean even more point inflation). Maybe you can only upvote at the current log_5 scale, but make each additional vote require a lengthier (and perhaps more visually satisfying) click.
I'd probably lean towards your own posts still starting with your max-upvote.
LW has a lot of old content, with old votes on it. This change will introduce a big disparity between the power of votes in the (pre-LW2) past and votes in the (post-LW2) future. I don't know that this is a problem, but it's a bit weird. (Consequence 1: when interpreting the score on a post or comment, you'll need to think about whether it's mostly been voted on recently or in the past. Consequence 2: when something has been voted on both recently and in the past, past voters' votes will have less influence on its score. Consequenc
Attention is a limited resource. I don't have the time or interest to read every comment on LessWrong. So what is karma even for? I use the karma score for one simple yes-no question: "Is reading this worth my time?".
Is displaying the number of upvotes minus downvotes really the best way to answer the question? Karma should not be about mere popularity, or path dependence based on whoever voted first. The weighting system is an improvement, but I think we can do better.
Display the estimated probability (as a percentage) that th
A not-so-obvious consequence of weighted voting (in the form we currently have, as opposed to Rob's suggestion which I think I like a lot): if you know or suspect that something has been voted on only once since it was posted (or: since you last looked) then you can tell what voting weight the person who voted on it had, and hence get some information about who it was.
I've been thinking a lot about karma, as any numerical incentive system risks people going down incentive gradients, checking numbers and otherwise aiming for the number rather than the thing we want to target. This is a Hard Problem, since we 100% need karma for LW to work at all. The first level solution (in addition to weighting, which likely will help) is for everyone to be thinking hard about this and vote accordingly rather than voting locally and instinctively, but that feels insufficient. I'm planting this flag to encourage others to thin
On StackOverflow there's a minimum of 15 reputation to be able to cast upvotes. I think it's better when newly registered accounts don't have the ability to vote.
What happens to users with negative karma? (I have noticed one such user commenting on my posts.)
I sometimes find myself agreeing (or disagreeing) with only part of a long comment.
Current options include replying with a quotation of the part in question, or voting on the whole thing based on the part. Sometimes this isn't worth the effort or seems unfair and I wish I could just vote on that one part.
Conciseness in comments is a virtue given our limited free time and attention, but I don't want to turn Less Wrong into Twitter. Due to inferential gaps, some concepts really do take long comments to get across, but aren'
Is there a plan to import our old karma? I see I currently have none when I definitely have more than none on old LW.
Kinda saying the obvious here, but just in case: did anyone consider an "eigentrust" or analogous system?
One of the distinguishing features of LW 2.0 is Voting Weight. People with more karma will be able to give higher-weighted upvotes and downvotes.
This is part of an overall plan to make it better at sorting signal-from noise. But it's a major change to the system and seemed worthy of a dedicated-discussion thread.
There are roughly three goals for the improved karma system:
I. A reasonable pace of quality content on the front page, which is the single conversation locus. (We're aiming for about 3-7 featured posts per week)
II. A reasonable opportunity for people (newcomers and otherwise) to get their ideas seen, receive feedback. (The front page involves an inherently limited supply of attention, so not everything can go there. But good posts should at least stick around on the Recent Posts page for awhile)
III. Implement goals I and II in a way that is (and feels) fair.
The problem is that LessWrong is an oddly specific community, and it won't be necessarily obvious to a newcomer what are the sorts of post we want to incentivize. So we want more experienced users who have a proven track epistemic record to be able to draw attention to posts more easily.
In light of Goal III, we don't want a high-karma user's vote to be overwhelming. So the current mathematical implementation is:
floor(log_5(karma)+1)+1
What this means in non-math-speak is that is that your voting weight looks something like:
0 karma: 1 voting weight
5 karma: 2 voting weight
25 karma: 3 voting weight
125 karma: 4 voting weight
625 karma: 5 voting weight
...
... roughly capping out for practical purposes at approximately:
400,000 karma: 9 voting weight (currently no users are near this level)
You may have noticed that when you upvote or downvote a post, it changes by more than 1 point. This is why.
New posts also start with their user having upvoted them once, so if you have 25 karma, you'll start with 3 points. This is to reflect that people who've been around longer are more likely to be writing things that are worth paying attention to. (Although note that this initial upvote doesn't count towards their overall karma score)
Shifting to a voting-weight based system also makes it easier to notice people who are abusing the system and nullify their votes (preventing mass-downvote attacks)
The LW 2.0 team has some thoughts about how to refine the voting system into something more fine-grained. But before sharing those ideas it seemed good to solicit a more general discussion. (Some of us might share our thoughts in the comments, but those thoughts will be from our perspectives as users rather than site developers)