The user most likely to engage in retributive downvoting are those who engage in hostile debate and subsequently have low karma ratio’s themselves (VoiceofRa has 68% favourability). Perhaps you could disable downvoting functionality for those with a karma ratio lower than 80%? Considering that poor quality of contributions is another big factor for low karma ratios this measure would have the added benefit that our most competent users have more power.
I’m only at 70% because of massive downvoting from Eugene Nier, who may very well also be VoiceOfRa. I’d be at over 80% just without Nier’s downvotes, even not also excluding VoiceOfRa’s downvotes.
The solution to downvoting is not to make it easier to hurt people like me with downvotes.
Think about how much effort everyone spends talking about karma, and trying to fix karma, and protect karma from abuse. Is all that effort worth it for the low signal karma provides? Who cares about amassing internet points, let quality speak for itself.
Suppose some comment thread has a thousand comments. Without a karma system (as e.g. on Slate Star Codex), I can either waste several hours reading them all, or quickly scroll the page looking for something catching my eye and hope I don’t miss something interesting. With a karma system, I can entrust the readership with the task of telling me which comments are the most worth reading, and read them first.
Entrusting the readership to tell you what’s good is what you want the karma system to do, but it’s not what the karma system is actually doing. Aside from sockpuppets, tribal voting, etc., it’s just not possible to generate good recommendation systems from karma systems (otherwise everyone would be doing it). Even more sophisticated “recursive” systems like pagerank don’t really work due to collusion, link farms (sockpuppets, basically), and related issues. Google moved away to a more complex system and has a full time police force to try to make the more complex thing work due to the constant threat of sabotage.
I think in practice you have to go by name or direct judgement of content. Karma gives you an illusion of a rank, but it’s a pretty terrible rank.
Slatestar’s comment system has lots of other problems aside from lacking karma, that make it difficult to follow what’s happening.
That’s a false dilemma. You don’t have to rank comments either chronologically or karmically. You can just look at what the comments say (or go by name, if people made a name for themselves). In other words, have a you-specific karma in your own brain.
I mean what did we expect, it’s not so easy to have a ranking of quality.
At least chronological order is objective, karma’s reliability is inversely proportional to how busy the idiots are.
That sounds like a causal claim to me! Are you sure reddit took over newsboard due to karma? Or is it accident + rich-get-richer (power law) effects? Something else? How do you know how much karma helps?
It is! No, but I would be willing to bet that it had an effect (Digg also over took newsboards, and it had karma in common with reddit). No, I think karma had something to do with it. No, I think karma had something to do with it. I don’t.
Slashdot had Karma years before Reddit and was not nearly as successful. Granted it didn’t try to do general forum discussions but just news articles, but this suggests that karma is not the whole story.
The user most likely to engage in retributive downvoting are those who engage in hostile debate and subsequently have low karma ratio’s themselves (VoiceofRa has 68% favourability). Perhaps you could disable downvoting functionality for those with a karma ratio lower than 80%? Considering that poor quality of contributions is another big factor for low karma ratios this measure would have the added benefit that our most competent users have more power.
Unless your goal is exclude folks like me (which could be your goal—I could be considered a marginal user), 80% is too high.
You are coming to this conclusion on the basis of a single data point, right?
“Please provide proof of your complete integration with the hive-mind before being allowed near the downvote button” X-D
Do you want LW to become an echo chamber?
Lumifer, your karma ratio is 80%.
I’m only at 70% because of massive downvoting from Eugene Nier, who may very well also be VoiceOfRa. I’d be at over 80% just without Nier’s downvotes, even not also excluding VoiceOfRa’s downvotes.
The solution to downvoting is not to make it easier to hurt people like me with downvotes.
Think about how much effort everyone spends talking about karma, and trying to fix karma, and protect karma from abuse. Is all that effort worth it for the low signal karma provides? Who cares about amassing internet points, let quality speak for itself.
Suppose some comment thread has a thousand comments. Without a karma system (as e.g. on Slate Star Codex), I can either waste several hours reading them all, or quickly scroll the page looking for something catching my eye and hope I don’t miss something interesting. With a karma system, I can entrust the readership with the task of telling me which comments are the most worth reading, and read them first.
Entrusting the readership to tell you what’s good is what you want the karma system to do, but it’s not what the karma system is actually doing. Aside from sockpuppets, tribal voting, etc., it’s just not possible to generate good recommendation systems from karma systems (otherwise everyone would be doing it). Even more sophisticated “recursive” systems like pagerank don’t really work due to collusion, link farms (sockpuppets, basically), and related issues. Google moved away to a more complex system and has a full time police force to try to make the more complex thing work due to the constant threat of sabotage.
I think in practice you have to go by name or direct judgement of content. Karma gives you an illusion of a rank, but it’s a pretty terrible rank.
Slatestar’s comment system has lots of other problems aside from lacking karma, that make it difficult to follow what’s happening.
Yes, but it’s not as terrible as ranking comments chronologically.
That’s a false dilemma. You don’t have to rank comments either chronologically or karmically. You can just look at what the comments say (or go by name, if people made a name for themselves). In other words, have a you-specific karma in your own brain.
I mean what did we expect, it’s not so easy to have a ranking of quality.
At least chronological order is objective, karma’s reliability is inversely proportional to how busy the idiots are.
I don’t always have that much time on my hands.
Well, you know what they say, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Maybe karma should be hidden. Hacker News doesn’t show it.
What is the point of having it at all?
I mean, there’s sound psychological reasons that having karma would increase participation and quality. That’s why reddit overtook classic newsboards
That sounds like a causal claim to me! Are you sure reddit took over newsboard due to karma? Or is it accident + rich-get-richer (power law) effects? Something else? How do you know how much karma helps?
It is! No, but I would be willing to bet that it had an effect (Digg also over took newsboards, and it had karma in common with reddit). No, I think karma had something to do with it. No, I think karma had something to do with it. I don’t.
Slashdot had Karma years before Reddit and was not nearly as successful. Granted it didn’t try to do general forum discussions but just news articles, but this suggests that karma is not the whole story.
slashdot was very succesful… at least enough that I know it’s name.
Yes, but that’s just because I’m so awesome :-P
Or maybe the hive-mind has an annoying smartassy subsystem :-)
There’s already too much of a pull towards the consensus opinions here, would punish us Nrxer’s quite a bit.