Eh, I hate strategic voting. “Yes means yes, no means no” has a certain elegance that “I mean no, but I am saying yes because other people are saying no, except now there are suddenly more yes’s than no’s and no one knows whether that actually means that most people agree or that too many people are voting strategically” misses.
A bad article should get negative feedback. The problem is that the resulting karma penalty may be too harsh for a new author. Perhaps there could be a way to disentangle this? For example, to limit the karma damage (to new authors only?); for example no matter how negative score you get for the article, the resulting negative karma is limited to, let’s say, “3 + the number of strong downvotes”. But for the purposes of hiding the article from the front page the original negative score would apply.
(Or maybe, in addition to upvote and downvote, there could be a third kind of vote, a “no-vote” that gives 0 karma, and only appears on the articles of new users? Meaning “I don’t like it, but I don’t want to discourage the author”. But the author could see e.g. total karma +1, 100 votes, so clearly the article was unpopular rather than unnoticed.)
When I came upon this post, it had a negative karma score. I don’t think it’s good form to have posts receiving negative net karma (except in extreme cases), so I upvoted to provide this with a positive net karma.
Well, at this moment the article has a +4 karma, and what exactly that means? The article was actually popular, it just had bad luck because the first readers didn’t like it. Or the article was unpopular, but many people who didn’t like it upvoted it anyway because… reasons? No one knows. And that is a problem, IMHO. The tool made to provide a signal now generates noise.
A bad article should get negative feedback. The problem is that the resulting karma penalty may be too harsh for a new author. Perhaps there could be a way to disentangle this? For example, to limit the karma damage (to new authors only?); for example no matter how negative score you get for the article, the resulting negative karma is limited to, let’s say, “3 + the number of strong downvotes”. But for the purposes of hiding the article from the front page the original negative score would apply.
I don’t think this would do anything to mitigate the emotional damage. And also, like, the difficulty of getting karma at all is much lower than getting it through posts (and much much lower than getting it through posts on the topic that you happen to care about). If someone can’t get karma through comments, or isn’t willing to try, man we probably don’t want them to be on the site.
Eh, I hate strategic voting. “Yes means yes, no means no” has a certain elegance that “I mean no, but I am saying yes because other people are saying no, except now there are suddenly more yes’s than no’s and no one knows whether that actually means that most people agree or that too many people are voting strategically” misses.
A bad article should get negative feedback. The problem is that the resulting karma penalty may be too harsh for a new author. Perhaps there could be a way to disentangle this? For example, to limit the karma damage (to new authors only?); for example no matter how negative score you get for the article, the resulting negative karma is limited to, let’s say, “3 + the number of strong downvotes”. But for the purposes of hiding the article from the front page the original negative score would apply.
(Or maybe, in addition to upvote and downvote, there could be a third kind of vote, a “no-vote” that gives 0 karma, and only appears on the articles of new users? Meaning “I don’t like it, but I don’t want to discourage the author”. But the author could see e.g. total karma +1, 100 votes, so clearly the article was unpopular rather than unnoticed.)
Well, at this moment the article has a +4 karma, and what exactly that means? The article was actually popular, it just had bad luck because the first readers didn’t like it. Or the article was unpopular, but many people who didn’t like it upvoted it anyway because… reasons? No one knows. And that is a problem, IMHO. The tool made to provide a signal now generates noise.
I don’t think this would do anything to mitigate the emotional damage. And also, like, the difficulty of getting karma at all is much lower than getting it through posts (and much much lower than getting it through posts on the topic that you happen to care about). If someone can’t get karma through comments, or isn’t willing to try, man we probably don’t want them to be on the site.
Ah yes, we should somehow encourage new members to try their ideas in comments rather than articles. More Open Threads perhaps?