The Karma system has its advantages but the present version strikes me as a bit too crude. For one thing, a down-vote from someone who down-votes everything is not as good evidence that the post is actually bad than a down-vote from someone who barely ever down-votes anything. Also, a down-vote from a poster with lots of Karma is better evidence that the post is bad than a down-vote from a poster with lots of Karma.
My suggestion is therefore that for any given level of Karma that you have, there should be definite limit to the number of up votes and down votes you can make. If you went over that limit, your votes would get diluted, so that, e.g. one up-vote from you only would give the poster .8 Karma.
If such a system would be introduced, it would also be natural to let people give less-than-full votes (say .5 up-vote, .3 down-vote, etc).
The drawback of such a system is of course that it is more complicated, but I think it would give a better picture of what posts are good and what aren’t.
There are online fora where downvoting costs you some of your own karma. That might be an effective compromise.
I like in principle the idea of weighting more informative votes more. I suppose what you’d want is that a vote counts for +/- log p where p is the fraction of the voter’s votes that are the same as it. (I’m not sure whether you’d want to count “neither up nor down” as a vote for this purpose. Let’s say we don’t.) So if someone downvotes everything, her downvotes would be worth nothing, but then her first upvote would be worth log N where N is her total number of votes. If we take the logs to base 2, then a vote either way from someone who upvotes and downvotes equally would be worth exactly 1 unit.
That would be kinda fun. I think it wouldn’t actually be that hard to implement (provided we didn’t want changes in vote frequency to be retroactive—which I think is correct) but it would complicate things and it might get gamed in ways more harmful than what we have now (e.g., casting a lot of meaningless votes on random comments to increase the power of one’s votes in the other direction).
My suggestion is rather like this. A new poster would get the ability to make some upvotes and some negative votes for free (say 20; perhaps you’d get more upvotes than downvotes). I think that’s necessary to encourage newcomers; otherwise they’d feel locked out.
As your karma increases, the number of positive and negative votes you can make increases. However, if you only ever give one down-vote, it’s not like that’s going to give the person receiving it minus 100 karma. There’s still an upper limit on −1. Otherwise, single downvotes could have too large an impact.
My suggestion is thus a) that the votes of people who vote a lot (either up or down) would get diluted and b) that the votes of people with little Karma would get diluted.
One possible drawback is that there might be people who read a lot, are good at distinguishing good posts from bad, but which don’t post and hence have little Karma. Such people’s votes would get heavily diluted in this system. But I suppose that’s a minor thing and all systems have their drawbacks after all.
I’m not sure that last one is really a drawback. It amounts to encouraging more active participation from people with good judgement. That would be a good thing.
I think I was unclear in my earlier comment: when I wrote “I suppose what you’d want is …” I didn’t actually mean I thought that was what you were proposing. I was ruminating on what happens if one takes seriously the idea of estimating how much evidence a given vote from someone with a given historical voting pattern provides.
I agree that just restricting the amount of voting each user can do is a simpler way to achieve something along similar lines.
The Karma system has its advantages but the present version strikes me as a bit too crude. For one thing, a down-vote from someone who down-votes everything is not as good evidence that the post is actually bad than a down-vote from someone who barely ever down-votes anything. Also, a down-vote from a poster with lots of Karma is better evidence that the post is bad than a down-vote from a poster with lots of Karma.
My suggestion is therefore that for any given level of Karma that you have, there should be definite limit to the number of up votes and down votes you can make. If you went over that limit, your votes would get diluted, so that, e.g. one up-vote from you only would give the poster .8 Karma.
If such a system would be introduced, it would also be natural to let people give less-than-full votes (say .5 up-vote, .3 down-vote, etc).
The drawback of such a system is of course that it is more complicated, but I think it would give a better picture of what posts are good and what aren’t.
There are online fora where downvoting costs you some of your own karma. That might be an effective compromise.
I like in principle the idea of weighting more informative votes more. I suppose what you’d want is that a vote counts for +/- log p where p is the fraction of the voter’s votes that are the same as it. (I’m not sure whether you’d want to count “neither up nor down” as a vote for this purpose. Let’s say we don’t.) So if someone downvotes everything, her downvotes would be worth nothing, but then her first upvote would be worth log N where N is her total number of votes. If we take the logs to base 2, then a vote either way from someone who upvotes and downvotes equally would be worth exactly 1 unit.
That would be kinda fun. I think it wouldn’t actually be that hard to implement (provided we didn’t want changes in vote frequency to be retroactive—which I think is correct) but it would complicate things and it might get gamed in ways more harmful than what we have now (e.g., casting a lot of meaningless votes on random comments to increase the power of one’s votes in the other direction).
My suggestion is rather like this. A new poster would get the ability to make some upvotes and some negative votes for free (say 20; perhaps you’d get more upvotes than downvotes). I think that’s necessary to encourage newcomers; otherwise they’d feel locked out.
As your karma increases, the number of positive and negative votes you can make increases. However, if you only ever give one down-vote, it’s not like that’s going to give the person receiving it minus 100 karma. There’s still an upper limit on −1. Otherwise, single downvotes could have too large an impact.
My suggestion is thus a) that the votes of people who vote a lot (either up or down) would get diluted and b) that the votes of people with little Karma would get diluted.
One possible drawback is that there might be people who read a lot, are good at distinguishing good posts from bad, but which don’t post and hence have little Karma. Such people’s votes would get heavily diluted in this system. But I suppose that’s a minor thing and all systems have their drawbacks after all.
I’m not sure that last one is really a drawback. It amounts to encouraging more active participation from people with good judgement. That would be a good thing.
I think I was unclear in my earlier comment: when I wrote “I suppose what you’d want is …” I didn’t actually mean I thought that was what you were proposing. I was ruminating on what happens if one takes seriously the idea of estimating how much evidence a given vote from someone with a given historical voting pattern provides.
I agree that just restricting the amount of voting each user can do is a simpler way to achieve something along similar lines.