Announcement: Legacy karma imported
Hey Everyone,
I finally got around to properly importing the old karma from LessWrong 1.0. Your vote-weight and the karma displayed on your profile should now reflect all the contributions you made to LessWrong over the years.
We might change this around again at some future point in time, but we just stuck with the same karma formula as the old LessWrong had, with old main posts being worth 10 karma per vote, and everything else being worth 1.
Sorry for this taking so long. Comment or ping us on Intercom if you notice anything karma-related being broken, or your karma not being properly imported.
/checks, sees 41k karma
Bwa ha ha! Power! INFINITE POWER!
I’ll bet old, high-karma users who have not logged into LW2 yet would be interested if you sent them an announcement email about this. (Actually, I would guess that a lot of old users would appreciate a LW2 announcement email, but tailoring it so high-karma users are told karma=power would probably boost clickthroughs for that subgroup and maybe reactivate old contributors. Depending on how snobby you were feeling, you could restrict your announcement email depending on the user’s upvotes recieved to downvote received ratio.)
Is there a writeup on LW2.0 karma/vote philosophy behind decisions like this? I’m really pleased that LW2.0 doesn’t show poster’s or commenter’s accumulated karm, only the votes for this specific post/comment. I hope that won’t change, and if it doesn’t, then I don’t see much reason to import, adjust, or otherwise mess with the past totals.
If it _does_ change, and/or there is some reason to care about totals, I’d recommend the opposite of this action: rather than preserving past scores, you should make karma decay over time, to
Just like old LW, accumulated karma has been visible at a user’s profile page. The main things we’ve dropped are the sidebars on all-time karma (which got dropped a while ago before the site change) and top contributors in last 30 days.
Currently, votes are weighted based on a user’s current accumulated karma. Before the import, it was the case that a veteran user who hadn’t participated in the beta had less powerful votes than a fresh user who had participated in the beta.
We covered a bit of our philosophy and ideas in the Strategic Overview post and the launch post.
The primary reason to mess with the past totals soon is that with the recent switch towards weighted karma, we introduced quite a bit of karma inflation, and we might not want to heavily overrepresent this specific period in the calculations that determine your vote-weight.
In the long-run I expect we will try various ways of using the vote-data we have to create more reliable and useful reputation systems than what we have right now (e.g. something like Eigenkarma), and for that we will probably change karma totals in some way or another (or make the idea of karma totals meaningless, who knows).