I don’t know how much of a problem it is, but there’s definitely something that can be done about it: instead of a “dumb” karma count, use some variant of Pagerank on the vote graph.
In other words, every person is a node, every upvote that each person gets from another user is a directed edge (also signed to incorporate downvotes), every person starts with a base amount of karma, and then you iteratively update the user karma by weighting each inbound vote by the karma of the voter.
When I say “variant of Pagerank”, I mean that you’d probably also have to fudge some things in there as well for practical reasons, like weighting votes by time to keep up with an evolving community, adding a bias so that a few top people don’t completely control the karma graph, tuning the base karma that people receive based on length of membership and/or number of posts, weighting submissions separately from comments, avoiding “black hat SEO” tricks, etc. You know, all those nasty things that make Google a lot more than “just” Pagerank at web scale...
IMO doing something like this would improve most high traffic comment systems and online communities substantially (Hacker News could desperately use something like that to slow its slide into Reddit territory, for instance), though it would severely de-democratize them; somehow I doubt people around here would have much of a problem with that, though. The real barrier is that it would be a major pain in the ass to actually implement, and would take several iterations to really get right. It also might be difficult to retrofit an existing voting system with anything like that because sometimes they don’t store the actual votes, but just keep a tally, so it would take a while to see if it actually helped at all (you couldn’t backtest on the existing database to tune the parameters properly).
I think they do store the votes because otherwise you’d be able to upvote something twice.
However my understanding is that changing lesswrong, even something as basic as what posts are displayed on the front page, is difficult, and so it makes sense why they haven’t implemented this.
I don’t know how much of a problem it is, but there’s definitely something that can be done about it: instead of a “dumb” karma count, use some variant of Pagerank on the vote graph.
In other words, every person is a node, every upvote that each person gets from another user is a directed edge (also signed to incorporate downvotes), every person starts with a base amount of karma, and then you iteratively update the user karma by weighting each inbound vote by the karma of the voter.
When I say “variant of Pagerank”, I mean that you’d probably also have to fudge some things in there as well for practical reasons, like weighting votes by time to keep up with an evolving community, adding a bias so that a few top people don’t completely control the karma graph, tuning the base karma that people receive based on length of membership and/or number of posts, weighting submissions separately from comments, avoiding “black hat SEO” tricks, etc. You know, all those nasty things that make Google a lot more than “just” Pagerank at web scale...
IMO doing something like this would improve most high traffic comment systems and online communities substantially (Hacker News could desperately use something like that to slow its slide into Reddit territory, for instance), though it would severely de-democratize them; somehow I doubt people around here would have much of a problem with that, though. The real barrier is that it would be a major pain in the ass to actually implement, and would take several iterations to really get right. It also might be difficult to retrofit an existing voting system with anything like that because sometimes they don’t store the actual votes, but just keep a tally, so it would take a while to see if it actually helped at all (you couldn’t backtest on the existing database to tune the parameters properly).
I think they do store the votes because otherwise you’d be able to upvote something twice.
However my understanding is that changing lesswrong, even something as basic as what posts are displayed on the front page, is difficult, and so it makes sense why they haven’t implemented this.