Karma as an absolute value is unstable and depends on various non-content factors, mainly number of readers. And number of readers is highly dependent on the poster name and published time of day. I don’t think anyone should ever think about “140 upvotes great”. At the extreme this is like thinking about what tweet is “10k likes good” on twitter, when the line obviously differ depending on whether the OP is Elon Musk or someone with 3 followers.
In my opinion, there are two obvious (though not perfect) improvements, (1) karma per completed reader and (2) karma per voter with neutral vote added.
At the end, the current use of karma is mainly to give you feel-good internet points as positive reinforcement, and to algorithmically boost good posts. This imperfect system is already mostly functional for these two use cases.
Karma as an absolute value is unstable and depends on various non-content factors, mainly number of readers. And number of readers is highly dependent on the poster name and published time of day. I don’t think anyone should ever think about “140 upvotes great”. At the extreme this is like thinking about what tweet is “10k likes good” on twitter, when the line obviously differ depending on whether the OP is Elon Musk or someone with 3 followers.
In my opinion, there are two obvious (though not perfect) improvements, (1) karma per completed reader and (2) karma per voter with neutral vote added.
At the end, the current use of karma is mainly to give you feel-good internet points as positive reinforcement, and to algorithmically boost good posts. This imperfect system is already mostly functional for these two use cases.
Btw, I collect LW voting norm discussions. These past discussions may be of interest to you:
Do you vote based on what you think total karma should be?
I liked your post, but did not upvote it. I think a fair valuation of that post is 35 karma. (Thread rooted from this comment)