Normally I try to use karma votes in a practical way to try to help promote content that I want to see more of on LW, or to downrank content that I want to see less of. (As opposed to using them as a kind of social signal, which is a separate issue.)
One thing I have never quite figured out is which of these two I should be doing to best accomplish that goal:
Look at the current score of a post or comment, and vote so as to adjust its current score towards what I would consider to be fair.
Judge the post independently of its current score, and have some thresholds of goodness in my mind (relative to a general standard of quality for LW posts) that I use to decide how to vote.
I could easily imagine some pros and cons to each approach. Is there any consensus as to which will make better results, either if I apply it independently, or if the community applied it universally?
My intuition is that the second is better, but I haven’t really figured out anything concrete.
[Question] Karma votes: blind to or accounting for score?
Normally I try to use karma votes in a practical way to try to help promote content that I want to see more of on LW, or to downrank content that I want to see less of. (As opposed to using them as a kind of social signal, which is a separate issue.)
One thing I have never quite figured out is which of these two I should be doing to best accomplish that goal:
Look at the current score of a post or comment, and vote so as to adjust its current score towards what I would consider to be fair.
Judge the post independently of its current score, and have some thresholds of goodness in my mind (relative to a general standard of quality for LW posts) that I use to decide how to vote.
I could easily imagine some pros and cons to each approach. Is there any consensus as to which will make better results, either if I apply it independently, or if the community applied it universally?
My intuition is that the second is better, but I haven’t really figured out anything concrete.