What should be the optimal initial Karma for a post/comment?
By default on reddit and lesswrong, posts start with 1 karma, coming from the user upvoting themselves. On lesswrong right now, it appears that this number can be set higher by strongly upvoting yourself. But this need not be the case. Posts and comments could start with either positive or negative karma. If posts start with larger positive karma, this might incentivize people to post/comment more often. Likewise, if posts or comments start off with negative karma, this acts as a disincentive to post.
A related idea would be to create a special board where posts/comments start off with large negative karma, but each upvote from users would give the poster more karma than usual. As a result, people would only post there if they expected their post to “break-even” in terms of Karma.
By default on reddit and lesswrong, posts start with 1 karma, coming from the user upvoting themselves.
Actually, on LessWrong, I’m fairly sure the karma value of a particular user’s regular vote depends on the user’s existing karma score. Users with a decent karma total usually have a default vote value of 2 karma rather than 1, so each comment they post will have 2 karma to start. Users with very high karma totals seem to have a vote that’s worth 3 karma by default. Something similar happens with strong votes, though I’m not sure what kind of math is used there.
Aside: I’ve sometimes thought that users should be allowed to pick a value for their vote that’s anywhere between 1 and the value of their strong upvote, instead of being limited to either a regular vote (2 karma in my case) or a strong vote (6 karma). In my case, I literally can’t give people karma values of 1, 3, 4, or 5, which could be useful for more granular valuations.
This is tangential, but I think I understand why you can’t pick a value for your vote. The idea behind giving high-karma users stronger votes was that a high-karma user having the same level of approval for a post is stronger evidence of the post’s quality. Something that Alicorn likes-but-not-enough-to-strong-upvote has a better shot at being good than something that new_user_420 likes-but-not-enough-to-strong upvote.
What should be the optimal initial Karma for a post/comment?
By default on reddit and lesswrong, posts start with 1 karma, coming from the user upvoting themselves. On lesswrong right now, it appears that this number can be set higher by strongly upvoting yourself. But this need not be the case. Posts and comments could start with either positive or negative karma. If posts start with larger positive karma, this might incentivize people to post/comment more often. Likewise, if posts or comments start off with negative karma, this acts as a disincentive to post.
A related idea would be to create a special board where posts/comments start off with large negative karma, but each upvote from users would give the poster more karma than usual. As a result, people would only post there if they expected their post to “break-even” in terms of Karma.
Actually, on LessWrong, I’m fairly sure the karma value of a particular user’s regular vote depends on the user’s existing karma score. Users with a decent karma total usually have a default vote value of 2 karma rather than 1, so each comment they post will have 2 karma to start. Users with very high karma totals seem to have a vote that’s worth 3 karma by default. Something similar happens with strong votes, though I’m not sure what kind of math is used there.
Aside: I’ve sometimes thought that users should be allowed to pick a value for their vote that’s anywhere between 1 and the value of their strong upvote, instead of being limited to either a regular vote (2 karma in my case) or a strong vote (6 karma). In my case, I literally can’t give people karma values of 1, 3, 4, or 5, which could be useful for more granular valuations.
This is tangential, but I think I understand why you can’t pick a value for your vote. The idea behind giving high-karma users stronger votes was that a high-karma user having the same level of approval for a post is stronger evidence of the post’s quality. Something that Alicorn likes-but-not-enough-to-strong-upvote has a better shot at being good than something that new_user_420 likes-but-not-enough-to-strong upvote.
This is indeed one of the major considerations.