Different people will have different ideas of where on the 4chan—colloquium continuum a discussion should be, so here’s a feature suggestion: post authors should be able to set a karma requirement to comment to the post. Beginner-level posts would draw questions about the basics, and other posts could have a karma requirement high enough to filter them out.
There could even be a karma requirement to see certain posts, for hiding Beisutsukai secrets from the general public.
a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren’t “Introduce yourself!” had a decent karma requirement.
b) You’d end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I’m an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don’t have much karma as a consequence, and I’d think it’d be to the community’s detriment if I was excluded for that reason.
Karma is not a very good criterion, it’s too much about participation, and less so about quality. It’s additive. A cutoff of 20 points to post articles seems a reasonable minimum requirement, but doesn’t tell much. The trolls who cause slow suffocation will often have 20 points, while new qualified people won’t. Only extreme values of Karma seem to carry any info, when controlled for activity. Comment rating as feedback signal is much more meaningful.
Karma is not a very good criterion, it’s too much about participation, and less so about quality. It’s additive.
What about looking at average karma per a comment rather than total karma? That might be a useful metric in general. There may be some people with very high karma that is due to high participation with a lot of mediocre comments. Someone with higher average karma might then be someone more worth paying attention to.
The negotiation of where LW threads should be on the 4chan-colloquium continuum is something I would let users handle by interacting with each other in discussions, instead of trying to force it to fit the framework of the karma system. I especially think letting people hide their posts from lurkers and other subsets of the Less Wrong userbase could set a bad precedent.
Different people will have different ideas of where on the 4chan—colloquium continuum a discussion should be, so here’s a feature suggestion: post authors should be able to set a karma requirement to comment to the post. Beginner-level posts would draw questions about the basics, and other posts could have a karma requirement high enough to filter them out.
There could even be a karma requirement to see certain posts, for hiding Beisutsukai secrets from the general public.
I’d worry that:
a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren’t “Introduce yourself!” had a decent karma requirement.
b) You’d end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I’m an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don’t have much karma as a consequence, and I’d think it’d be to the community’s detriment if I was excluded for that reason.
Karma is not a very good criterion, it’s too much about participation, and less so about quality. It’s additive. A cutoff of 20 points to post articles seems a reasonable minimum requirement, but doesn’t tell much. The trolls who cause slow suffocation will often have 20 points, while new qualified people won’t. Only extreme values of Karma seem to carry any info, when controlled for activity. Comment rating as feedback signal is much more meaningful.
What about looking at average karma per a comment rather than total karma? That might be a useful metric in general. There may be some people with very high karma that is due to high participation with a lot of mediocre comments. Someone with higher average karma might then be someone more worth paying attention to.
The negotiation of where LW threads should be on the 4chan-colloquium continuum is something I would let users handle by interacting with each other in discussions, instead of trying to force it to fit the framework of the karma system. I especially think letting people hide their posts from lurkers and other subsets of the Less Wrong userbase could set a bad precedent.
Woah. If we accept your suggestion, how long before karma turns into money, with bargaining and stuff?