> I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all.
This is actually moderately harder to implement in a way that makes sense. If you set the initial thing to 0, people get confused about whether the buttons are working (it just looks like a bug, or if you make it explicit that it doesn’t work because they are new, it’s a fairly offputting initial attempt to engage with the discussion)
One possibility is to let people upvote things, and see the upvote, but it doesn’t actually start weighting things for other people until they’ve gotten at least 5 karma. This might be better but is more work to implement.
Another possibility (with some added work) is to not display the voting buttons at all until someone has 5 karma. Hacker News does this for downvotes, I believe.
My worry on letting their upvote only appear for them is that it’s dishonest, in addition to any coding issues.
I agree that the button doing nothing visible seems bad, so we’d want to have some other visual indicator that it worked, such as displaying number of upvotes somewhere—they’d still count for that.
I agree with this. I also think that needing to get 5 karma before voting isn’t that discouraging, and the kinds of users it discourages (ones who are too impatient to want to hang out and read stuff before they get to influence where things go; ones who will just lurk forever no matter what; ones who are unusually easily discouraged or unambitious...) might be outweighed by the kinds of users it encourages to comment who otherwise would just lurk. Particularly if the voting requirement is some low, obviously reachable karma level, I could imagine it feeling like a tantalizing prize that would make me want to start commenting.
Also, keeping brand-new users from voting would have some advantages for limiting sockpuppet shenanigans, ‘we just got linked from the front page of reddit’ mayhem, and the like.
Strong endorsement of the principle that not every potential user is a net positive, and driving away potential new users is not automatically bad. Maximizing views/users/etc too much is a classic trap metric.
I think that principle would apply to ‘leaves because they couldn’t vote without 5 karma’ but could be convinced otherwise by people worth keeping saying ‘this would drive me away if I were new.’
This did drive me away from both stackoverflow and lesswrong for a long time, and what finally made me feel able to interact with them is learning that it is possible to make good posts and get karma. I think it’s a reasonable restriction, and that it creates a problem that is likely best solved another way.
Huh—making sure I get this: you were driven away by inability to upvote, but you think it is probably still better to have that restriction and find some other way to reassure people they can get karma and participate?
Assuming I understand you correctly this is a stronger-than-average endorsement of the karma restriction.
StackExchange also has a minimum reputation requirement for votes to count. When you try to vote on something it displays a box saying the vote was recorded but doesn’t change the publicly displayed vote count.
What I don’t like about the way it is implemented on StackExchange is that it seems it’s not possible to take back a vote until you have enough reputation to vote at all.
Besides protecting the vote count from being distorted by newcomers, I think the main advantage is that it makes it much harder to farm a bunch of karma with sockpuppet accounts.
> I would consider taking out the initial point, which would mean that you need 5 Karma to vote at all.
This is actually moderately harder to implement in a way that makes sense. If you set the initial thing to 0, people get confused about whether the buttons are working (it just looks like a bug, or if you make it explicit that it doesn’t work because they are new, it’s a fairly offputting initial attempt to engage with the discussion)
One possibility is to let people upvote things, and see the upvote, but it doesn’t actually start weighting things for other people until they’ve gotten at least 5 karma. This might be better but is more work to implement.
Another possibility (with some added work) is to not display the voting buttons at all until someone has 5 karma. Hacker News does this for downvotes, I believe.
My worry on letting their upvote only appear for them is that it’s dishonest, in addition to any coding issues.
I agree that the button doing nothing visible seems bad, so we’d want to have some other visual indicator that it worked, such as displaying number of upvotes somewhere—they’d still count for that.
I agree with this. I also think that needing to get 5 karma before voting isn’t that discouraging, and the kinds of users it discourages (ones who are too impatient to want to hang out and read stuff before they get to influence where things go; ones who will just lurk forever no matter what; ones who are unusually easily discouraged or unambitious...) might be outweighed by the kinds of users it encourages to comment who otherwise would just lurk. Particularly if the voting requirement is some low, obviously reachable karma level, I could imagine it feeling like a tantalizing prize that would make me want to start commenting.
Also, keeping brand-new users from voting would have some advantages for limiting sockpuppet shenanigans, ‘we just got linked from the front page of reddit’ mayhem, and the like.
Strong endorsement of the principle that not every potential user is a net positive, and driving away potential new users is not automatically bad. Maximizing views/users/etc too much is a classic trap metric.
I think that principle would apply to ‘leaves because they couldn’t vote without 5 karma’ but could be convinced otherwise by people worth keeping saying ‘this would drive me away if I were new.’
This did drive me away from both stackoverflow and lesswrong for a long time, and what finally made me feel able to interact with them is learning that it is possible to make good posts and get karma. I think it’s a reasonable restriction, and that it creates a problem that is likely best solved another way.
Huh—making sure I get this: you were driven away by inability to upvote, but you think it is probably still better to have that restriction and find some other way to reassure people they can get karma and participate?
Assuming I understand you correctly this is a stronger-than-average endorsement of the karma restriction.
StackExchange also has a minimum reputation requirement for votes to count. When you try to vote on something it displays a box saying the vote was recorded but doesn’t change the publicly displayed vote count.
What I don’t like about the way it is implemented on StackExchange is that it seems it’s not possible to take back a vote until you have enough reputation to vote at all.
Besides protecting the vote count from being distorted by newcomers, I think the main advantage is that it makes it much harder to farm a bunch of karma with sockpuppet accounts.