The existing system—rewards writing a lot of content that is barely worth reading.
Your proposal—if you happen to write something extraordinarily good at your first attempt, such that you don’t trust yourself to achieve such high bar again on average… it incentivizes you to never post anything again.
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I spent some time thinking about this, writing, and deleting again… I think the key problem is that for an optimal equation you should also somehow include how many people saw that comment. Like: “three people saw that comment, three people upvoted” sounds great; “hundred people saw that comment, five upvoted” sounds like mostly a waste of time. You can’t derive this from votes alone.
I think that acts as a slight incentive against demon threads, which seems good to me. I do think it would be valuable if you could easily get the ratio of people upvoting to people seeing a comment and not upvoting. But you are also not counting against it the ratio of people downvoting to people seeing a comment and not downvoting, so maybe it balances out?
The existing system—rewards writing a lot of content that is barely worth reading.
Your proposal—if you happen to write something extraordinarily good at your first attempt, such that you don’t trust yourself to achieve such high bar again on average… it incentivizes you to never post anything again.
.
I spent some time thinking about this, writing, and deleting again… I think the key problem is that for an optimal equation you should also somehow include how many people saw that comment. Like: “three people saw that comment, three people upvoted” sounds great; “hundred people saw that comment, five upvoted” sounds like mostly a waste of time. You can’t derive this from votes alone.
Seems like that’s easily fixable by having the numerator be most upvotes on a single post/comment, or your total upvotes, whichever is higher.
I think that acts as a slight incentive against demon threads, which seems good to me.
I do think it would be valuable if you could easily get the ratio of people upvoting to people seeing a comment and not upvoting. But you are also not counting against it the ratio of people downvoting to people seeing a comment and not downvoting, so maybe it balances out?