If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
If the only function is to silence the writer, than the system doesn’t make that much sense at all. Beyond the twenty points needed to prove trustworthy, karma only serves as emotional satisfaction. This is clearly intended as incentive be mindful of what you post. There would be no reason for people to accumulate thousands of points. Maybe there could be a system of likes and dislikes, as well as a system of up or downvotes.
Up and down are only to be used in regard to rationality, and they’ll be limited. These votes would be on display to show whether or not a person should be trusted. There should probably be limits on how much of these a person can have.
The likes and dislikes should be used when someone says something either clever or amusing, or something like my comment which people might consider unhelpful, but does not reflect on my rationality. This would be displayed above the comments, but the total amount of likes a commenter has stored up will be private.
This way the emotional element will still be present, but will not interfere with a person’s ability to add to our understanding of rationality.
Downvotes you can make are limited to some multiple of your karma.
I didn’t know that..… How does that make sense?
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn’t seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don’t post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting power of existing users. I was annoyed because I had to change my voting policy, but I only had to gain a few hundred karma at that point to catch up. With the initial policy, I would have had to gain more karma than Eliezer had at the time, in order to downvote again.
Why limit the downvoting ability of people who have already proven unlikely to abuse that power? Why not just limit downvoted until you reach a certain point, like the twenty karma rule for adding main posts?
As compared to that, the current system trades “Established users might get limited in downvoting ability at very large numbers” for “Someone might get the requisite 20 karma and then pillage the site”.
It’s a pretty good tradeoff, but I still think I like your system better.
Yes, this sort of thing was proposed at the site’s inception (I was a major proponent), but it failed to get off the ground. Mostly, the objection was that the UI would necessarily be confusing.
The people who frequent this site are expected to read a sequence of posts explaining quantum physics, but a dual “like” system is too complicated?
inorite?!