I don’t disagree with weighted votes per se, but saying “6 downvotes” really is misleading, if there were actually less than 6 votes.
I wonder whether it would be helpful to display the karma in analog form, for example as a line, where longer line would mean more total votes (not in linear proportion, but in a way where infinite number of votes asymptotically corresponds to the full width of the used part of page), and the line has a green part and gray part whose length ratio represents the upvotes/downvotes ratio. And of course tooltip for number, but the idea is that people would get the right idea without seeing the numbers.
I agree that it’s misleading. One thing that’s been mooted—I don’t know whether it’s in any way likely to happen, but it seems like it would be an improvement—is changing from “a level-n user’s vote is worth n points” to “a level-n user can vote up to n times on anything”. Then if you wanted to use your awesome multi-voting power (1) you’d have to expend at least a little extra effort, (2) you would have the option of giving intermediate numbers of votes, and (3) it would no longer be wrong to say “this got 7 upvotes and 3 downvotes” or whatever.
The analogue-karma-display idea is intriguing. My immediate feeling is that it would be really hard to make this comprehensible, though.
I don’t disagree with weighted votes per se, but saying “6 downvotes” really is misleading, if there were actually less than 6 votes.
I wonder whether it would be helpful to display the karma in analog form, for example as a line, where longer line would mean more total votes (not in linear proportion, but in a way where infinite number of votes asymptotically corresponds to the full width of the used part of page), and the line has a green part and gray part whose length ratio represents the upvotes/downvotes ratio. And of course tooltip for number, but the idea is that people would get the right idea without seeing the numbers.
I agree that it’s misleading. One thing that’s been mooted—I don’t know whether it’s in any way likely to happen, but it seems like it would be an improvement—is changing from “a level-n user’s vote is worth n points” to “a level-n user can vote up to n times on anything”. Then if you wanted to use your awesome multi-voting power (1) you’d have to expend at least a little extra effort, (2) you would have the option of giving intermediate numbers of votes, and (3) it would no longer be wrong to say “this got 7 upvotes and 3 downvotes” or whatever.
The analogue-karma-display idea is intriguing. My immediate feeling is that it would be really hard to make this comprehensible, though.