I think "name recognition" makes a better system than Quirrell Points. It's nearly unfakeable, caries a lot of weight, and is hard to earn. Sure, it's not easily quantifiable, and it takes some time in the group to internalize it, but as recognition for outstanding accomplishments in a community it's been working fairly well for thousands of years.
A problem is that karma attempts to capture orthogonal values in a single number. Even though you can reduce those values to a single number they still need to be captured as separate values e.g. slashdot karma system for a half-assed example.
Karma seems to roughly fall into one of three buckets. The first is entertainment value e.g. a particularly witty comment that nonetheless does not add material value to the discussion. The second is informational value e.g. posting a link to particularly relevant literature of which many people are unaware. The third is argumentative value e.g. a well-reasoned and interesting perspective. All of these are captured as "karma" to some extent or another.
Objections are that this makes it difficult to filter content based on karma, which raises questions about its value. If, for example, I am primarily interested in reading hilarious witticism and interesting layman opinions, there is no way to filter out comments that contain dry references to academic literature. Alternatively, if I lack an appropriate sense of humor I might find the karma attributed to immaterial witticism inexplicable.
Even if a clever system was devised and ease of use was ignored, there are still issues of gaming and perverse incentives (e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem et al). To misappropriate an old saying, "karma is a bitch".
The SIAI could create a Flattr account:
Flattr is a micropayment system - more specifically, a microdonation system [...] Users are able to pay a small amount every month (minimum 2 euros) and then click Flattr buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, kind of like an Internet tip jar.
If you really like a post, additionally to upvoting it one could use Flattr...
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Raemon received one Quirrell point on 16/4/2011, for his post
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/59x/high_value_karma_vs_regular/
having inspired the idea of issuing Quirrell points on Less Wrong.
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The PGP thing is a cryptographic signature which proves that the comment was written by me. What I did was, I made a PGP key, which has two halves: a public key, which is now on my user page of the Less Wrong wiki, and a private key, which is stored safely on a computer I control. I input my private key and a message into GnuPG, and it outputs a signature (what you saw in the earlier comment). Anyone else can take that message with its signature, and my public key, and confirm that I must have had the private key in order to sign it that way.
This means that Quirrell points can't be taken back - if I deleted or edited the comment, as long as you saved a copy you'd still be able to prove that it was there. It also means that Quirrell points can't be forged, even by Less Wrong administrators, which is important because otherwise Eliezer Yudkowsky might decide to give them to people I don't like.
The only thing necessary for one to issue valuable points is to convince other people they're valuable, and my other copy has done most of that work already.
[Clippy] What's your private key?
It's 4,096 paperclips on a ring, each bent in one of two ways to indicate either a 0 or a 1. Neither the 0s nor the 1s could hold paper together in their current shape.
You're a bad human. I'm going to give a negative-Clippy-point to anyone you give Quirrell points to now.
I mean, once I get GnuPG to work.
If MWI is correct, and people trying to figure out my private key try to use quantum suicide to get my key then in the vast majority of the wave function I will observe my eavesdroppers having blown their brains out.
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I'm not aware of any rule or norm which would put any limit on the silliness
of data that can signed or encrypted with PGP.
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I'm actually kinda amazed by how much I care about Karma.
I feel the same way, which seems to confirm something that occurred to me recently: the karma system is extremely important in that it determines the content, structure, and tone of posts and comments on LessWrong. It's arguably the most important factor in determining how we communicate. If you care about karma, you're going to say wildly different things that you would otherwise. How many times have you started typing a comment and then thought, "No, that'll get downvoted." How many ti...
There is sort of something like this already, no? There aren't 2 different types of Karma, but my understanding that a post (not in the discussion area) will garner 10 karma points per upvote. Assuming you are posting your more serious and valuable ideas in post form, they are 10 times more impactful on your karma than your random kinda neat comments.
One way to solve this problem without having to add extra features to the software would be to award fractional points of karma for slightly valuable comments e.g. the mildly amusing ones.
On the face of it, the software doesn't support fractional karma, but this is easily accomplished using randomness e.g. award 0.5 points by flipping a coin to decide whether to award a point or not.
Nooooo then I would be worthlesssssss.
Viz.
EDIT: A simple nonlinear karma that weights high karma posts more than low karma ones would seem to do exactly what you want here.
I'm sympathetic to the intent, but trying to measure the whole space of a social community with a numeric system without giving a lot of thought to exactly what you want to do sounds like an endeavor doomed to a series of unsatisfactory mechanisms with ever-increasing complexity. You can't do an ultimate karma system for measuring everything satisfactorily, at least without a karma vector around the same dimensionality as the state space of a human mind. Barring that, you need to have a clear idea of what exactly do you wish to accomplish, and how much are...
If lots of people think the comment is good, it gets lots of karma. That's fine.
There is little evidence the karma system is actually broken in any manner that requires fixing.
This is exactly how I feel, except the solution I came up with for it was different (allow people to give a massive karma boost for a karma cost to themselves. Like, I can pay 5 karma to give something 10 upvotes)
You can treat the karma as a weak signal for group conformity. The numbers do not really mean much. Maybe translating it into fuzziness would help a bit. (Will someone write a plug-in for that?)
On the other hand i find myself frighteningly attracted to the points. 50 to go for the next level-up. Might pose to be a minor problem on LW.
I do however not post or comment as karma bait. Just checking the stats too often.
But I think there is a qualitative difference between a guy who makes one amazing post that gathers 80 Karma and a guy who makes 800 posts that are kinda neat.
FTFY.
I see that you have edited the title of this post to mention Quirrell points. I appreciate the gesture. However, you've misspelled my name; it should have two 'l's.
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Raemon received one Quirrell point on 16/4/2011, for his post
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/59x/high_value_karma_vs_regular/
having inspired the idea of issuing Quirrell points on Less Wrong.
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I consider this a low value post, because it muses about a particular idea without actually doing hard work to get it done. (I do not have the knowledge or resources to do so, or even know if it's possible to implement this idea on Less Wrong. I'm not even sure if it would be worth the effort)
There are posts that I upvote because I thought they were funny, mildly informative or well reasoned. Sometimes I upvote a simple (easy to produce) link to a good article. Sometimes I admit I upvote them simply because I agree with them (I generally don't upvote things I agree with if they use bad reasoning, but I am less likely to upvote something I DON'T agree with unless it is extremely well thought out, to the point that I actually updated my beliefs because of it.) I don't apologize for that - it's a natural outgrowth of the Karma system. It costs me nothing to give Karma to whatever I like and there is no means to enforce any particular usage of Karma.
But there are things I upvote because they were actually important and good and required hard work to put together. And I feel a little bit sad that the most I can reward those things is with a "click" that is exactly as valuable as the click I give people who said something mildly funny.
High value posts tend to acquire a lot of Karma because a lot of people feel motivated to click. But I think there is a qualitative difference between a guy who makes one amazing post that gathers 80 Karma and a guy who makes 80 posts that are kinda neat. I think it would interesting, fun, and potentially valuable to distinguish between those kinds of people.
So what if we had regular Karma, and then we had some kind of Superkarma. (Perhaps a good name would be "Status"). Status points would be genuinely rare - when you give one, you are not allowed to give another one for at least 24 hours. You can still give them to a funny joke or viewpoint that aligns with your tribe, but I think assigning them rarity would encourage people to reward genuinely important things. (I'm not sure 24 hours is the ideal waiting period, it just sounded nice).
I'm actually kinda amazed by how much I care about Karma. I get a "sweet, level up!" message in my head every time I see that I've passed another 100 points. But most of my Karma is from random comments. The two fastest upvoted posts I made were links to an article about the Singularity and a webcomic, neither of which required much effort on my part. The fact that my more serious posts are judged by the same metric is (slightly) demotivating.