On existing LW systems, and on how they shape and incentivize discussions here:
Moderation-by-moderator is expensive and doesn’t scale. So sites like Reddit or Less Wrong use a karma system. Some impacts of this system:
Whether a post or comment is good or bad is determined by a single scalar, i.e. karma.
So how do you vote on a comment you consider important and valuable for the most part, but which contains one sentence you consider very wrong? Maybe upvote it while explaining your disagreement?
Or what do you do with comments that seem high-effort but very wrongheaded? I want to incentivize effort, even if it occasionally produces wrongheaded results; but upvoting would suggest agreement.
What if a comment looks correct and receives lots of upvotes, but over time new info indicates that it’s substantially incorrect? Past readers might no longer endorse their upvote, but you can’t exactly ask them to rescind their upvotes, when they might have long since moved on from the discussion.
How much karma a comment gets depends to a significant extent on how many views it gets, i.e. on a) how early it’s posted, b) on how much traffic the post will get overall, and c) on whether it’s a top-level comment or a nested comment. So you can’t 100% distinguish a comment of high quality vs. one which was just seen a lot. Conversely, if a comment has little karma, that may be because people haven’t seen it (e.g. because it’s new), or because people have seen it and not considered it valuable. How could one tell the difference?
There are various tensions between posting one big comprehensive post or comment (e.g. so all discussion is in the same place) vs. several small ones (e.g. so people can vote on or respond to separate parts separately). This is related to both the karma system and the threaded-comments system.
Posts vs. comments: Posts are much easier to discover and reference than comments, and conversely some valuable site meta discussions get lost in sub-sub-sub comment threads.
Effortful comments just take a ton of time. For example, my comments in this thread have so far easily taken >2h to write.
Everywhere on the Internet, New is considered Better (e.g. LW posts get traffic from Google and Hacker News, both of which prefer new content). This has various consequences, like most discussion on a post happening in the first few hours or days.
And so on. Will post suggestions in a separate thread.
On existing LW systems, and on how they shape and incentivize discussions here:
Moderation-by-moderator is expensive and doesn’t scale. So sites like Reddit or Less Wrong use a karma system. Some impacts of this system:
Whether a post or comment is good or bad is determined by a single scalar, i.e. karma.
So how do you vote on a comment you consider important and valuable for the most part, but which contains one sentence you consider very wrong? Maybe upvote it while explaining your disagreement?
Or what do you do with comments that seem high-effort but very wrongheaded? I want to incentivize effort, even if it occasionally produces wrongheaded results; but upvoting would suggest agreement.
What if a comment looks correct and receives lots of upvotes, but over time new info indicates that it’s substantially incorrect? Past readers might no longer endorse their upvote, but you can’t exactly ask them to rescind their upvotes, when they might have long since moved on from the discussion.
How much karma a comment gets depends to a significant extent on how many views it gets, i.e. on a) how early it’s posted, b) on how much traffic the post will get overall, and c) on whether it’s a top-level comment or a nested comment. So you can’t 100% distinguish a comment of high quality vs. one which was just seen a lot. Conversely, if a comment has little karma, that may be because people haven’t seen it (e.g. because it’s new), or because people have seen it and not considered it valuable. How could one tell the difference?
There are various tensions between posting one big comprehensive post or comment (e.g. so all discussion is in the same place) vs. several small ones (e.g. so people can vote on or respond to separate parts separately). This is related to both the karma system and the threaded-comments system.
Posts vs. comments: Posts are much easier to discover and reference than comments, and conversely some valuable site meta discussions get lost in sub-sub-sub comment threads.
Effortful comments just take a ton of time. For example, my comments in this thread have so far easily taken >2h to write.
Everywhere on the Internet, New is considered Better (e.g. LW posts get traffic from Google and Hacker News, both of which prefer new content). This has various consequences, like most discussion on a post happening in the first few hours or days.
And so on. Will post suggestions in a separate thread.