Here are some principles that are informing some of my thinking here, some pushing in different directions
Karma isn’t that great a metric – I think people often vote for dumb reasons, and they vote highest in drama-threads that don’t actually reflect important new intellectual principles. I think there are maybe ways we can improve on the karma system, and I want to consider those soon. But I still think karma-as-is is at least a pretty decent proxy metric to keep the site running smoothly and scaling.
Because karma is only a proxy metric, I’d still expect moderator judgment to play a significant role in making sure the system isn’t going off the rails in the immediate future
each comment comes with a bit of an attentional cost. If you make a hundred comments and get 10 karma (and no downvotes), I think you’re most likely not a net-positive contributor. (i.e. each comment maybe costs 1/5th of a karma in attention or something like that)
in addition, I think highly upvoted comments/posts tend to be dramatically more valuable than weakly upvoted comments/posts. (i.e. a 50 karma comment is more than 10 times as valuable as a 5 karma comment, most of the time [with an exception IMO for drama threads]
The current karma system kinda encourages people to write lots of comments that get slightly upvoted and gives them the impression of being an established regular. I think in most cases users with a total average karma of ~1-2 are typically commenting in ways that are persistently annoying in some way, in a way that’d be sort of fine with each individual comment but adds up to some kind of “death by a thousand cuts” thing that makes the site worse.
On the other hand, lots of people drawn to LessWrong have a lot of anxiety and scrupulosity issues and I generally don’t want people overthinking this and spending a lot of time worrying about it.
My hope is to frame the thing more around positive rewards than punishments.
Here are some principles that are informing some of my thinking here, some pushing in different directions
Karma isn’t that great a metric – I think people often vote for dumb reasons, and they vote highest in drama-threads that don’t actually reflect important new intellectual principles. I think there are maybe ways we can improve on the karma system, and I want to consider those soon. But I still think karma-as-is is at least a pretty decent proxy metric to keep the site running smoothly and scaling.
Because karma is only a proxy metric, I’d still expect moderator judgment to play a significant role in making sure the system isn’t going off the rails in the immediate future
each comment comes with a bit of an attentional cost. If you make a hundred comments and get 10 karma (and no downvotes), I think you’re most likely not a net-positive contributor. (i.e. each comment maybe costs 1/5th of a karma in attention or something like that)
in addition, I think highly upvoted comments/posts tend to be dramatically more valuable than weakly upvoted comments/posts. (i.e. a 50 karma comment is more than 10 times as valuable as a 5 karma comment, most of the time [with an exception IMO for drama threads]
The current karma system kinda encourages people to write lots of comments that get slightly upvoted and gives them the impression of being an established regular. I think in most cases users with a total average karma of ~1-2 are typically commenting in ways that are persistently annoying in some way, in a way that’d be sort of fine with each individual comment but adds up to some kind of “death by a thousand cuts” thing that makes the site worse.
On the other hand, lots of people drawn to LessWrong have a lot of anxiety and scrupulosity issues and I generally don’t want people overthinking this and spending a lot of time worrying about it.
My hope is to frame the thing more around positive rewards than punishments.