Well, karma is a tangible (if imperfect) measure of success in this community, and rationalists should win… right?
I think this perception is a problem for the community, and I don’t think it’s workable to tell people to not feel like this. Two possible ways around it:
Make comment scores affect karma only if it goes outside some range, e.g., perhaps you’d lose a point of karma for a −2 post, two points for −3 post, gain a point for +2 post, two points for a +3, &c. This would likely be a pain to implement.
Make karma dropping normal and expected, but not tied to participation, e.g., take the square root of everyone’s karma on a weekly basis. This has obvious downsides for karma cutoffs to do certain things (like post articles).
I like this conceptually, but pragmatically I do not see its advantage. I think one way to do something similar is to keep karma split into positive and negative karma. I am currently around 75 karma, but my hunches tell me that is probably +125 −50. Someone sitting at +125 −50 is different than +250 −175 or +80 −5.
Having bad karma get its own bucket is less demeaning than having it change your entire “score”. It is still bad but you can still get a feel good from the positive scores.
(Edit) Oh, Jordan said the same thing. Please ignore this comment.
Well, karma is a tangible (if imperfect) measure of success in this community, and rationalists should win… right?
I think this perception is a problem for the community, and I don’t think it’s workable to tell people to not feel like this. Two possible ways around it:
Make comment scores affect karma only if it goes outside some range, e.g., perhaps you’d lose a point of karma for a −2 post, two points for −3 post, gain a point for +2 post, two points for a +3, &c. This would likely be a pain to implement.
Make karma dropping normal and expected, but not tied to participation, e.g., take the square root of everyone’s karma on a weekly basis. This has obvious downsides for karma cutoffs to do certain things (like post articles).
I like this conceptually, but pragmatically I do not see its advantage. I think one way to do something similar is to keep karma split into positive and negative karma. I am currently around 75 karma, but my hunches tell me that is probably +125 −50. Someone sitting at +125 −50 is different than +250 −175 or +80 −5.
Having bad karma get its own bucket is less demeaning than having it change your entire “score”. It is still bad but you can still get a feel good from the positive scores.
(Edit) Oh, Jordan said the same thing. Please ignore this comment.