I often find that postings voted little nonetheless sometimes come with a lively and up-voted discussion.
The listing of postings shows the karma of the posting but gives no indication of the volume and quality of the discussion.
At least for the display of a positing it should be easy to display an additional karma score indicating the sum total of the conments. That’d give an indication of the aggregate.
This would improve awareness of positing discussions.
On the other hand such a scoring might further drain away participation from topics which fail to attract discussion.
As long as the controversial discussions are up-voted that shouldn’t be a problem.
Except if you disagree with the classical system of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Indeed. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot infer signal from that.
Human emotions are also primary signals. And nonetheless you can e.g. use perception of shouting (accomanying anger) to locate conflict areas in a social group. In a way karma expenditure is such a shouting and draws attention.
The problem somewhat is that karma is one-dimensional. Each emotion-pair is a dimension and we have no way to signal e.g. happiness, fear, awe, … Slashdot for example has the funny tag. That could be used.
And entirely different approach would be to vote the votes. But for that the votes would need to be visible. And voting would have to have an associated cost.
One obvious problem with that system; what happens with habitually bad posters?
Let’s say I write something so insipid and worthless that it’s worth every downvote on the site… and then a better-quality poster writes an excellent point-by-point take-down of it and gets tons of upvotes for it. Should I then benefit from “generating” such a high quality rebuttal, or is that just going to weaken the already weak incentive structure the karma system is supposed to be creating?
I can think of a good case just in the last few days of a poor-quality poster who would seriously benefit from this system, and as a long time poster here you can probably think of more.
I don’t think that an excellent point-by-point take-down in a comment is not a good idea because
a) It is not very visible and if it is excellent and makes a point it should be done as an independent posting.
b) Writing a point-by-point take-down may be overkill and alienate the initial poster. Compensating him with karma may make good for this (and motivate the commenter to post separately).
c) I think individual counters should be addressed by individual comments to allow the to be voted and commented individually.
In the remaining cases and if the point-by-point reply is well meaning and clarifies matters that were unclear for the initial poster: Why shouldn’t he get some credit for honstly (possibly mustering some courage) bringung up a question?
It is of course important to choose a suitable fraction of the comment karma.
Let’s say I write something so insipid and worthless that it’s worth every downvote on the site… and then a better-quality poster writes an excellent point-by-point take-down of it and gets tons of upvotes for it.
You have motivated the better poster to write an excellent post.
If you original post was really insipid and useless it would just be ignored. Capable people rarely waste effort on refuting truly worthless stuff.
Not very. Note my hedging in mentioning “capable” people :-)
I think that in the short term there is the incentive to pile onto the stupid post and shred it to bits. But the bloom on this flower fades very rapidly. Smart people tend to realize that it’s not a good use of their time.
Contrast this to a nonstupid but controversial position which motivates someone to write an excellent piece—for an example consider Yvain’s anti-neoreactionary FAQ.
Thinking a bit about it I don’t think it would be a good idea to add the generated karma to the top poster or even a fixed fraction of it. The fraction should decrease with distance from the root because all intermediate commentes also deserve a share of the pot and the pot shouldn’t increase by itself. The function of distance should be between harmonic and exponential I think. Or it could be tuned by sampling actual comment trees (only that your whole idea is to influence the shape of the tree).
I often find that postings voted little nonetheless sometimes come with a lively and up-voted discussion.
The listing of postings shows the karma of the posting but gives no indication of the volume and quality of the discussion.
At least for the display of a positing it should be easy to display an additional karma score indicating the sum total of the conments. That’d give an indication of the aggregate.
This would improve awareness of positing discussions. On the other hand such a scoring might further drain away participation from topics which fail to attract discussion.
I would take it farther—I’d like to see people get a small percentage of the karma from the discussions their posts and comments generate.
I would worry that this would incentivize controversial discussions.
As long as the controversial discussions are up-voted that shouldn’t be a problem. Except if you disagree with the classical system of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Votes in controversial discussions are usually more about signaling than anything else.
Indeed. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot infer signal from that.
Human emotions are also primary signals. And nonetheless you can e.g. use perception of shouting (accomanying anger) to locate conflict areas in a social group. In a way karma expenditure is such a shouting and draws attention.
The problem somewhat is that karma is one-dimensional. Each emotion-pair is a dimension and we have no way to signal e.g. happiness, fear, awe, … Slashdot for example has the funny tag. That could be used.
And entirely different approach would be to vote the votes. But for that the votes would need to be visible. And voting would have to have an associated cost.
One obvious problem with that system; what happens with habitually bad posters?
Let’s say I write something so insipid and worthless that it’s worth every downvote on the site… and then a better-quality poster writes an excellent point-by-point take-down of it and gets tons of upvotes for it. Should I then benefit from “generating” such a high quality rebuttal, or is that just going to weaken the already weak incentive structure the karma system is supposed to be creating?
I can think of a good case just in the last few days of a poor-quality poster who would seriously benefit from this system, and as a long time poster here you can probably think of more.
I don’t think that an excellent point-by-point take-down in a comment is not a good idea because
a) It is not very visible and if it is excellent and makes a point it should be done as an independent posting.
b) Writing a point-by-point take-down may be overkill and alienate the initial poster. Compensating him with karma may make good for this (and motivate the commenter to post separately).
c) I think individual counters should be addressed by individual comments to allow the to be voted and commented individually.
In the remaining cases and if the point-by-point reply is well meaning and clarifies matters that were unclear for the initial poster: Why shouldn’t he get some credit for honstly (possibly mustering some courage) bringung up a question?
It is of course important to choose a suitable fraction of the comment karma.
You have motivated the better poster to write an excellent post.
If you original post was really insipid and useless it would just be ignored. Capable people rarely waste effort on refuting truly worthless stuff.
How confident of that are you?
Not very. Note my hedging in mentioning “capable” people :-)
I think that in the short term there is the incentive to pile onto the stupid post and shred it to bits. But the bloom on this flower fades very rapidly. Smart people tend to realize that it’s not a good use of their time.
Contrast this to a nonstupid but controversial position which motivates someone to write an excellent piece—for an example consider Yvain’s anti-neoreactionary FAQ.
Thinking a bit about it I don’t think it would be a good idea to add the generated karma to the top poster or even a fixed fraction of it. The fraction should decrease with distance from the root because all intermediate commentes also deserve a share of the pot and the pot shouldn’t increase by itself. The function of distance should be between harmonic and exponential I think. Or it could be tuned by sampling actual comment trees (only that your whole idea is to influence the shape of the tree).
Do you mean that as an orthogonal direction thus not showing in the karma associated with the post but only on their ‘account’.
Or do you mean it that the aggregated karma score I proposed is actual karma the poster gets?
I was thinking it would go into their single listing of karma, but it might be better as a separate number.