I unconfidently think it would be good if there was some way to promote posts on LW (and maybe the EA forum) by paying either money or karma. It seems reasonable to require such promotion to require moderator approval.
Probably, money is better.
The idea is that this is both a costly signal and a useful trade.
The idea here is similar to strong upvotes, but:
It allows for one user to add more of a signal boost than just a strong upvote.
It doesn’t directly count for the normal vote total, just for visibility.
It isn’t anonymous.
Users can easily configure how this appears on their front page (while I don’t think you can disable the strong upvote component of karma for weighting?).
I always like seeing interesting ideas, but this one doesn’t resonate much for me. I have two concerns:
Does it actually make the site better? Can you point out a few posts that would be promoted under this scheme, but the mods didn’t actually promote without it? My naive belief is that the mods are pretty good at picking what to promote, and if they miss one all it would take is an IM to get them to consider it.
Does it improve things to add money to the curation process (or to turn karma into currency which can be spent)? My current belief is that it does not—it just makes things game-able.
Stackoverflow has long had a “bounty” system where you can put up some of your karma to promote your question. The karma goes to the answer you choose to accept, if you choose to accept an answer; otherwise it’s lost. (There’s no analogue of “accepted answer” on LessWrong, but thought it might be an interesting reference point.)
I lean against the money version, since not everyone has the same amount of disposable income and I think there would probably be distortionary effects in this case [e.g. wealthy startup founder paying to promote their monographs.]
That’s not really how the system on Stackoverflow works. You can give a bounty to any answer not just the one you accepted.
It’s also not lost but:
If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there’s no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.
I unconfidently think it would be good if there was some way to promote posts on LW (and maybe the EA forum) by paying either money or karma. It seems reasonable to require such promotion to require moderator approval.
Probably, money is better.
The idea is that this is both a costly signal and a useful trade.
The idea here is similar to strong upvotes, but:
It allows for one user to add more of a signal boost than just a strong upvote.
It doesn’t directly count for the normal vote total, just for visibility.
It isn’t anonymous.
Users can easily configure how this appears on their front page (while I don’t think you can disable the strong upvote component of karma for weighting?).
I always like seeing interesting ideas, but this one doesn’t resonate much for me. I have two concerns:
Does it actually make the site better? Can you point out a few posts that would be promoted under this scheme, but the mods didn’t actually promote without it? My naive belief is that the mods are pretty good at picking what to promote, and if they miss one all it would take is an IM to get them to consider it.
Does it improve things to add money to the curation process (or to turn karma into currency which can be spent)? My current belief is that it does not—it just makes things game-able.
I think mods promote posts quite rarely other than via the mechanism of deciding if posts should be frontpage or not right?
Fair enough on “just IM-ing the mods is enough”. I’m not sure what I think about this.
Your concerns seem reasonable to me. I probably won’t bother trying to find examples where I’m not biased, but I think there are some.
Eyeballing the curated log, seems like they curate approximately weekly, possibly more than weekly.
Yeah we curate between 1-3 posts per week.
Curated posts per week (two significant figures) since 2018:
2018: 1.9
2019: 1.6
2020: 2
2021: 2
2022: 1.8
2023: 1.4
Stackoverflow has long had a “bounty” system where you can put up some of your karma to promote your question. The karma goes to the answer you choose to accept, if you choose to accept an answer; otherwise it’s lost. (There’s no analogue of “accepted answer” on LessWrong, but thought it might be an interesting reference point.)
I lean against the money version, since not everyone has the same amount of disposable income and I think there would probably be distortionary effects in this case [e.g. wealthy startup founder paying to promote their monographs.]
That’s not really how the system on Stackoverflow works. You can give a bounty to any answer not just the one you accepted.
It’s also not lost but: