Take as a sample some of the people who have made nonmeta top-level posts in the past week or so and aren’t super-regular posters. I count Shalmanese, David Balan, Matt, Mr. Hen, Warrigal, and JHuffman. A few of the posts I downvoted, but none was so abominably stupid that the person involved should be ridden out of town on a rail.
I looked up how long it took each of those posters to earn their 20 karma/50 karma based on comment points alone (not counting comments replying to their own posts). IE, how far do you have to go back for all comments between then and now to total >20/50 karma? It was quick and involved a lot of skimming and mental math, but it was something like:
Matt: 20 September, 50 May
JHuffman: 20 April, 50 March
MrHen: 20 July, 50 June
Warrigal: 20 early Dec, 50 early Nov
Shalmanese: 20 September, not at 50 yet
David Balan: AFAICT only comments on his own posts
If these numbers are representative of people who aren’t super-regulars but like making top-level posts, they’re getting comment karma on other people’s posts somewhere like five to ten per month.
That means it takes someone with their usage habits 2-4 months to get 20 comment karma and 5-10 months to get 50. It also means that if one of these people’s first posts made a dumb mistake and got them voted down to −5, then at 50 point threshold it’d take another 5-10 months for them to be able to make their second.
The cost of having too low a threshold is that there are a few dumb posts that never get promoted to where anyone can see them anyway. The cost of having too high a threshold is that we miss out on interesting information and the community doesn’t expand.
Lower the posting threshold back to 20, and maybe do something about first post downvotes.
Take as a sample some of the people who have made nonmeta top-level posts in the past week or so and aren’t super-regular posters. I count Shalmanese, David Balan, Matt, Mr. Hen, Warrigal, and JHuffman. A few of the posts I downvoted, but none was so abominably stupid that the person involved should be ridden out of town on a rail.
I looked up how long it took each of those posters to earn their 20 karma/50 karma based on comment points alone (not counting comments replying to their own posts). IE, how far do you have to go back for all comments between then and now to total >20/50 karma? It was quick and involved a lot of skimming and mental math, but it was something like:
Matt: 20 September, 50 May
JHuffman: 20 April, 50 March
MrHen: 20 July, 50 June
Warrigal: 20 early Dec, 50 early Nov
Shalmanese: 20 September, not at 50 yet
David Balan: AFAICT only comments on his own posts
If these numbers are representative of people who aren’t super-regulars but like making top-level posts, they’re getting comment karma on other people’s posts somewhere like five to ten per month.
That means it takes someone with their usage habits 2-4 months to get 20 comment karma and 5-10 months to get 50. It also means that if one of these people’s first posts made a dumb mistake and got them voted down to −5, then at 50 point threshold it’d take another 5-10 months for them to be able to make their second.
The cost of having too low a threshold is that there are a few dumb posts that never get promoted to where anyone can see them anyway. The cost of having too high a threshold is that we miss out on interesting information and the community doesn’t expand.
Lower the posting threshold back to 20, and maybe do something about first post downvotes.