Going to take John’s comment and this reckoning as a good time to say that while 10x is a large multiplier on top-level front-page posts, 1x is not a large multiplier, and to the extent that karma matters comments are getting too large a share.
Front-page posts don’t necessarily need a multiplier to be more valuable—they already get a lot more visibility,. A larger number of voters will see and consider voting on a top-level or front-page post than any comment or short-form.
A lot comes down to “why do we track accumulations of karma from the past in the first place?” I’d love to see a reasoning for what levels various posters should have, and then backwards-calculate (fit) a scoring mechanism into that.
Insofar as “total karma should try to approximate ideal ‘Rationalist Social Status’”, I think ideally it would incorporate things like “how often do they introduce novel information that turns out to actually be true.”
And this suggests a bunch of things like “tracking their predictions / success” and “noticing when their early ideas were relevant to things that later get well established as true.” Which all seems like important things to figure out how to do. But I’m not sure whether it fits into the abstraction of what karma currently is. One key goal of karma is “dole out bits of reward that create a positive incentive gradient to follow”, which is a pretty different goal than “track total idealized social status.”
Currently we go out of our way to not make people’s total karma super prominent (it doesn’t appear when you mouseover their username, nor does your karma appear at the top of each page, like it did on old lesswrong).
Insofar as “total karma should try to approximate ideal ‘Rationalist Social Status’”
Cool, that’s a good goal. The ideal approach to implementation would be propose the social status of, say 2000 randomly-selected posters, and then to run a regression over lots of variables to figure out how to predict that from posts. I don’t think that starting with “a function of votes on posts and comments” is likely to get there—too many other dimensions play into it.
I suspect my karma total is ridiculously high in terms of social status. It’s huge just because I’ve been here a long time.
Yeah, this seems reasonable. One of the nice things about this migration is that it’s now very easy for us to adjust the rules and then just rerun the history again. So now is a pretty good time for suggestions for how the rules should change.
Going to take John’s comment and this reckoning as a good time to say that while 10x is a large multiplier on top-level front-page posts, 1x is not a large multiplier, and to the extent that karma matters comments are getting too large a share.
Front-page posts don’t necessarily need a multiplier to be more valuable—they already get a lot more visibility,. A larger number of voters will see and consider voting on a top-level or front-page post than any comment or short-form.
A lot comes down to “why do we track accumulations of karma from the past in the first place?” I’d love to see a reasoning for what levels various posters should have, and then backwards-calculate (fit) a scoring mechanism into that.
Insofar as “total karma should try to approximate ideal ‘Rationalist Social Status’”, I think ideally it would incorporate things like “how often do they introduce novel information that turns out to actually be true.”
And this suggests a bunch of things like “tracking their predictions / success” and “noticing when their early ideas were relevant to things that later get well established as true.” Which all seems like important things to figure out how to do. But I’m not sure whether it fits into the abstraction of what karma currently is. One key goal of karma is “dole out bits of reward that create a positive incentive gradient to follow”, which is a pretty different goal than “track total idealized social status.”
Currently we go out of our way to not make people’s total karma super prominent (it doesn’t appear when you mouseover their username, nor does your karma appear at the top of each page, like it did on old lesswrong).
Cool, that’s a good goal. The ideal approach to implementation would be propose the social status of, say 2000 randomly-selected posters, and then to run a regression over lots of variables to figure out how to predict that from posts. I don’t think that starting with “a function of votes on posts and comments” is likely to get there—too many other dimensions play into it.
I suspect my karma total is ridiculously high in terms of social status. It’s huge just because I’ve been here a long time.
Yeah, this seems reasonable. One of the nice things about this migration is that it’s now very easy for us to adjust the rules and then just rerun the history again. So now is a pretty good time for suggestions for how the rules should change.