One might say that this is the point of the rating system, as it allows the group as a whole to evaluate the content.
What we want is each voter to provide independent evidence about the quality of the post. So the voters influencing each other is a bad idea. We already have the system where for a discussion post, the karma score shrinks to a dot when it is young, so the first voters have a slightly harder time seeing how their peers are voting. This doesn’t do anything to prevent bias in my votes though, as I get to discussion threads via this page, where they are visible.
Now that LessWrong seems to have moved to most discussion occuring in open threads and other big threads like that, maybe a similar feature for comments would be a good idea?
The other thing we can do to deal with it is to just take vote scores on comments slightly less seriously, keeping in mind that they may be due to this bias.
What we want is each voter to provide independent evidence about the quality of the post. So the voters influencing each other is a bad idea. We already have the system where for a discussion post, the karma score shrinks to a dot when it is young, so the first voters have a slightly harder time seeing how their peers are voting. This doesn’t do anything to prevent bias in my votes though, as I get to discussion threads via this page, where they are visible.
Now that LessWrong seems to have moved to most discussion occuring in open threads and other big threads like that, maybe a similar feature for comments would be a good idea?
The other thing we can do to deal with it is to just take vote scores on comments slightly less seriously, keeping in mind that they may be due to this bias.