You’ve made me understand the root of one of my own dissatisfactions with the current system. If I look through my post history and roughly group my posts into bins based on how I would summarize them, this is what I see:
Silly posts in the HP:MOR threads: ~ +20 karma
Posts of mine having little content except to express agreement with other high-karma posts: ~ +10 karma
Important information or technical corrections in serious discussions: ~ +1 karma
Posts which I try to say something technical which I retrospectively realize were poorly worded but could have been clarified if someone pointed out an issue instead of just downvoting: ~ −5 karma
Perhaps I exaggerate slightly but my point is that if I were to formulate a posting strategy aimed at obtaining karma, then I would avoid saying anything technical or discussing anything serious and stick to applause lights and fluff.
On top of this, I tend to watch how the karma of my most recent comments behaves, and so I notice that, for example, a comment might have +5 upvotes and −3 downvotes, with no replies. This is just baffling to me. Was there something wrong with the post that three people noticed? Were the three separate things wrong with it? Was it just a response to the tone? What about the upvotes, is it being upvoted because of the witticism at the end, or because of the technical content in the middle? My point is something like Slashdot has a system where things are voted “funny” or “insightful” would be infinitely more useful.
Perhaps I exaggerate slightly but my point is that if I were to formulate a posting strategy aimed at obtaining karma, then I would avoid saying anything technical or discussing anything serious and stick to applause lights and fluff.
That’s about right. Also, stick to high traffic threads. Hit the HPMOR threads hard!
As I pointed out that people want different things out of the list, you finish by pointing out that the karma votes themselves are clearly used differently by different people. They’re also used to a different extent by different people.
One nice thing that Slashdot does is limit your karma votes. That keeps individual Karma Kops from have a disproportionate effect on total score. But I don’t think the Slashdot system of multiple scores is that helpful.
From my experience in the grand old days of Usenet, the most useful filters were on people, and the important ease of use features were a single screen view of all threads, expand and contract, sort by date or thread, and sort by date for a subset of threads.
I think you might be falling prey to a sort of fundamental attribution error for comments… thinking of all votes on a comment as being about the internal traits of the comment itself.
I generally vote to enact a total ordering on all current content, aiming to raise valuable/unique/informative/pro-social content to reader-serving prominence. This involves determining an ideal arrangement of content and voting everything down that is too high, and voting up everything that is too low… except, I try to keep the floor at zero total except where content is (sadly) above the sanity waterline of LW, as with some discussions of gender relations and politics.
About the only “pure knee jerk voting” I engage in is upvoting of content that isn’t mind-killing in itself but that has a negative total. Sometimes I upvote a comment simply because someone said something really awesome as a rebuttal to it, and that comment/rebuttal pair is worth reading, and the way to give the conversation the order-of-reading-attention it deserves is to upvote the parent.
(+1) I rarely downvote, but from now on, I will accompany any downvote with a reply stating “-1: reason for downvote.”
I will downvote every such comment because I oppose this being used as a general policy. I don’t want to see the spam and sometimes it just isn’t useful to criticize explicitly. Even when downvoting is accompanied by such an criticism it is sometimes better to just speak directly rather than dragging in talk about your downvotes as part of the conversation.
This seems like a reasonable approach. The reason for the downvote could force a defamatory statement, which I prefer to avoid. Otherwise, you are right that dragging in a downvote mention doesn’t add anything to just saying what you want to say. Thanks for the comment, by the way.
I was thinking that upon downvoting, maybe an option (not a requirement) should be given to state a reason why. Then I realized that there is no need to program such a thing; this option exists already.
Too much information can be ignored, too little information is sometimes annoying. I’d always welcome your reason for explaining your downvote, especially if it seems legitimate to me.
If we were going to get highly technical, a somewhat interesting thing to do would be to allow a double click to differentiate your downvote, and divide it into several “slider bars.” People who didn’t differentiate their downvotges would be listed as “general downvote” Those who did differentiate would be listed as a “specific reason downvote.” A small number of “common reasons for downvoting that don’t merit an individualized comment” on LessWrong would be present, plus an “other” box. If you clicked on the light gray “other”, it would be replaced with a dropdown selection box, one whose default position you could type into, limited to 140 characters. Other comments could be “poorly worded, but likely to be correct” “Poorly constructed argument,” “well-worded but likely incorrect” “ad hominem attack” “contains logical fallacies” “bad grammar” “bad formatting” “ignores existing body of thought, seems unaware of existing work on the subject” “anti-consensus, likely wrong” “anti-consensus, grains of truth.”
There could also be a “reason for upranking,” including polar opposite options that were the opposites of the prior options, so one need only adjust one slider bar for “positive and negative” common reasons. This would allow a + and—value to be associated with comments, to obtain a truer picture of the comment more quickly. “Detailed rankings” (listed next to the general ranking) could give commentators a positive and a negative for various reasons, dividing up two possible points, and adjusting remaining percentages for remaining portions of a point as the slider bar was raised. “General argument is true” could be the positive “up” value, “general argument is false” could be its polar opposite.
It also might be interesting to indicate how long people took to write their comments, if they were written in the edit window, and not copied and pasted. A hastily written comment could be downranked as “sloppily written” unless it was an overall optimal comment.
Then, when people click on the comment ranking numbers, they could see a popup window with all the general up and downvotes, and with many of them providing specific reasoning behind them. clicking on a big “X” would close the window.
I also like letting unregistered users voting in a separate “unregistered users” ranking. Additionally, it would be interesting to create a digital currency for the site that can be traded or purchased, in order to create market karma. Anyone who produces original work for LW could be paid corresponding to the importance of the work, according to their per hour payscale and the number of hours (corresponding to “real world pay” from the CFAR, or other cooperating organizations).
A friend of mine made $2M off of an initial small investment in bitcoin, and never fails to rub that in when I talk to him. I’d like it if a bunch of LW people made similar profits off of ideas they almost inherently understand. Additionally, it would be cool to get paid for “intellectual activity” or “actual useful intellectual work” (depending on one’s relationship with the site) :)
You’ve made me understand the root of one of my own dissatisfactions with the current system. If I look through my post history and roughly group my posts into bins based on how I would summarize them, this is what I see:
Silly posts in the HP:MOR threads: ~ +20 karma
Posts of mine having little content except to express agreement with other high-karma posts: ~ +10 karma
Important information or technical corrections in serious discussions: ~ +1 karma
Posts which I try to say something technical which I retrospectively realize were poorly worded but could have been clarified if someone pointed out an issue instead of just downvoting: ~ −5 karma
Perhaps I exaggerate slightly but my point is that if I were to formulate a posting strategy aimed at obtaining karma, then I would avoid saying anything technical or discussing anything serious and stick to applause lights and fluff.
On top of this, I tend to watch how the karma of my most recent comments behaves, and so I notice that, for example, a comment might have +5 upvotes and −3 downvotes, with no replies. This is just baffling to me. Was there something wrong with the post that three people noticed? Were the three separate things wrong with it? Was it just a response to the tone? What about the upvotes, is it being upvoted because of the witticism at the end, or because of the technical content in the middle? My point is something like Slashdot has a system where things are voted “funny” or “insightful” would be infinitely more useful.
That’s about right. Also, stick to high traffic threads. Hit the HPMOR threads hard!
As I pointed out that people want different things out of the list, you finish by pointing out that the karma votes themselves are clearly used differently by different people. They’re also used to a different extent by different people.
One nice thing that Slashdot does is limit your karma votes. That keeps individual Karma Kops from have a disproportionate effect on total score. But I don’t think the Slashdot system of multiple scores is that helpful.
From my experience in the grand old days of Usenet, the most useful filters were on people, and the important ease of use features were a single screen view of all threads, expand and contract, sort by date or thread, and sort by date for a subset of threads.
I think you might be falling prey to a sort of fundamental attribution error for comments… thinking of all votes on a comment as being about the internal traits of the comment itself.
I generally vote to enact a total ordering on all current content, aiming to raise valuable/unique/informative/pro-social content to reader-serving prominence. This involves determining an ideal arrangement of content and voting everything down that is too high, and voting up everything that is too low… except, I try to keep the floor at zero total except where content is (sadly) above the sanity waterline of LW, as with some discussions of gender relations and politics.
About the only “pure knee jerk voting” I engage in is upvoting of content that isn’t mind-killing in itself but that has a negative total. Sometimes I upvote a comment simply because someone said something really awesome as a rebuttal to it, and that comment/rebuttal pair is worth reading, and the way to give the conversation the order-of-reading-attention it deserves is to upvote the parent.
(+1) I rarely downvote, but from now on, I will accompany any downvote with a reply stating “-1: reason for downvote.”
I will downvote every such comment because I oppose this being used as a general policy. I don’t want to see the spam and sometimes it just isn’t useful to criticize explicitly. Even when downvoting is accompanied by such an criticism it is sometimes better to just speak directly rather than dragging in talk about your downvotes as part of the conversation.
This seems like a reasonable approach. The reason for the downvote could force a defamatory statement, which I prefer to avoid. Otherwise, you are right that dragging in a downvote mention doesn’t add anything to just saying what you want to say. Thanks for the comment, by the way.
I was thinking that upon downvoting, maybe an option (not a requirement) should be given to state a reason why. Then I realized that there is no need to program such a thing; this option exists already.
Too much information can be ignored, too little information is sometimes annoying. I’d always welcome your reason for explaining your downvote, especially if it seems legitimate to me.
If we were going to get highly technical, a somewhat interesting thing to do would be to allow a double click to differentiate your downvote, and divide it into several “slider bars.” People who didn’t differentiate their downvotges would be listed as “general downvote” Those who did differentiate would be listed as a “specific reason downvote.” A small number of “common reasons for downvoting that don’t merit an individualized comment” on LessWrong would be present, plus an “other” box. If you clicked on the light gray “other”, it would be replaced with a dropdown selection box, one whose default position you could type into, limited to 140 characters. Other comments could be “poorly worded, but likely to be correct” “Poorly constructed argument,” “well-worded but likely incorrect” “ad hominem attack” “contains logical fallacies” “bad grammar” “bad formatting” “ignores existing body of thought, seems unaware of existing work on the subject” “anti-consensus, likely wrong” “anti-consensus, grains of truth.”
There could also be a “reason for upranking,” including polar opposite options that were the opposites of the prior options, so one need only adjust one slider bar for “positive and negative” common reasons. This would allow a + and—value to be associated with comments, to obtain a truer picture of the comment more quickly. “Detailed rankings” (listed next to the general ranking) could give commentators a positive and a negative for various reasons, dividing up two possible points, and adjusting remaining percentages for remaining portions of a point as the slider bar was raised. “General argument is true” could be the positive “up” value, “general argument is false” could be its polar opposite.
It also might be interesting to indicate how long people took to write their comments, if they were written in the edit window, and not copied and pasted. A hastily written comment could be downranked as “sloppily written” unless it was an overall optimal comment.
Then, when people click on the comment ranking numbers, they could see a popup window with all the general up and downvotes, and with many of them providing specific reasoning behind them. clicking on a big “X” would close the window.
I also like letting unregistered users voting in a separate “unregistered users” ranking. Additionally, it would be interesting to create a digital currency for the site that can be traded or purchased, in order to create market karma. Anyone who produces original work for LW could be paid corresponding to the importance of the work, according to their per hour payscale and the number of hours (corresponding to “real world pay” from the CFAR, or other cooperating organizations).
A friend of mine made $2M off of an initial small investment in bitcoin, and never fails to rub that in when I talk to him. I’d like it if a bunch of LW people made similar profits off of ideas they almost inherently understand. Additionally, it would be cool to get paid for “intellectual activity” or “actual useful intellectual work” (depending on one’s relationship with the site) :)