When moderating comments, the goal is not to vote good posts up and bad posts down, but to make the vote total most accurately reflect the signals of all the people who voted on it. Since voters don’t gain or lose anything by voting accurately, besides the satisfaction of knowing that their votes help the scores more accurately reflect post quality, they should always vote according to their private signal, and ignore the signals that others have given.
On the other hand, when signaling is tied together with some other choice, then information cascades can happen. The example that was given in my networks class was a case of two restaurants next to each other, where each potential patron can see how busy each restaurant is. In that case, people don’t care about their signal, but just want to visit the better restaurant, and an information cascade is likely to occur. A similar occurrence happens with book purchases: if a book appears on a best-seller list, then that signals to everyone that it’s good, but it may only be there because people bought it based on that signal. There are documented examples of clever publishers have buying copies of their own books to kick-start this effect.
When moderating comments, the goal is not to vote good posts up and bad posts down, but to make the vote total most accurately reflect the signals of all the people who voted on it. Since voters don’t gain or lose anything by voting accurately, besides the satisfaction of knowing that their votes help the scores more accurately reflect post quality, they should always vote according to their private signal, and ignore the signals that others have given.
On the other hand, when signaling is tied together with some other choice, then information cascades can happen. The example that was given in my networks class was a case of two restaurants next to each other, where each potential patron can see how busy each restaurant is. In that case, people don’t care about their signal, but just want to visit the better restaurant, and an information cascade is likely to occur. A similar occurrence happens with book purchases: if a book appears on a best-seller list, then that signals to everyone that it’s good, but it may only be there because people bought it based on that signal. There are documented examples of clever publishers have buying copies of their own books to kick-start this effect.