It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the new rule was intended to achieve I have to admit. The fact that some people with fairly high karma had already greatly exceeded the limit was interesting to me though—it suggested a possible skewing of karma scores by certain individuals downvoting with much higher frequency than others, to an extent that surprised me. If part of the intention is to avoid some individuals having undue influence on karma scores (which some comments seemed to suggest) then applying the restriction retroactively achieves that.
I wouldn’t generally support retroactive laws but I don’t find the law analogy very helpful here. I find it interesting that you use the word punished as well—it seems to me that the value of the karma system is as a kind of ‘collective intelligence’ mechanism that provides ratings valuable to the community as a whole through the aggregation of individual votes. I don’t see it as a way to make the forum more enjoyable to use because of the ‘reward’ of up or downvoting other people’s comments. Saying punish suggests that part of the reason people use the forum is to enjoy the rush of saying ‘Yay’ or ‘Boo’ to things they like/dislike. That may be true but it wasn’t how I was thinking of karma.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the new rule was intended to achieve I have to admit. The fact that some people with fairly high karma had already greatly exceeded the limit was interesting to me though—it suggested a possible skewing of karma scores by certain individuals downvoting with much higher frequency than others, to an extent that surprised me. If part of the intention is to avoid some individuals having undue influence on karma scores (which some comments seemed to suggest) then applying the restriction retroactively achieves that.
I wouldn’t generally support retroactive laws but I don’t find the law analogy very helpful here. I find it interesting that you use the word punished as well—it seems to me that the value of the karma system is as a kind of ‘collective intelligence’ mechanism that provides ratings valuable to the community as a whole through the aggregation of individual votes. I don’t see it as a way to make the forum more enjoyable to use because of the ‘reward’ of up or downvoting other people’s comments. Saying punish suggests that part of the reason people use the forum is to enjoy the rush of saying ‘Yay’ or ‘Boo’ to things they like/dislike. That may be true but it wasn’t how I was thinking of karma.