I appreciate your explanation of your explanation of your downvote.
I expect these kinds of problems to be solved by the LW karma system and the “off-topic?” reacts. I believe the LW karma system is robust, well-implemented, and generally used very properly by users. I also believe it typically functions very well in terms of elevating desirable comments and punishing/downgrading lower-value ones. It’s not perfect, but it’s not only better than literally every other comment ranking system I have come across, but also perfectly adequate (IMO) to handle potential hijacking situations.
I am struck by the extent to which you, as a mod running this site and implementing this very system, don’t seem to agree with me on this. If it was just this one comment, I wouldn’t say much. But I recall @habryka also said at some point during the unfortunate kerfuffle a month and a half ago:
If we had a better karma system, I think there are some tools that I might want to make available to people that are better than banning. Maybe things like karma thresholds, or some other way of making it so a user needs to be in particular good standing to leave a comment. But unfortunately, our current karma system is not robust enough for that, and indeed, leaving many bad comments, is still unfortunately a way to get lots of karma.
Karma doesn’t reliably work as a visibility mechanism for comments.
[...]
Overall, I think you should model karma as currently approximately irrelevant for managing visibility of comments due to limited volume of comments, and the thread structure making strict karma sorting impossible, so anything of the form “but isn’t comment visibility handled by the karma system” is basically just totally wrong, without substantial changes to the karma system and voting.
Is this something the entire LW mod team agrees with, broadly? It seems entirely incompatible with my own experience on this site.
I think you’re asking if the whole mod team agrees with “the LW karma system is NOT robust, well-implemented and generally used very properly by users”.
I think in general the LW team thinks that the karma system is generally used properly by users (not sure about “very properly”, for example I think we’re probably not skilled enough, as a userbase, at using it. Habryka might even disagree with “properly”, because he so strongly wants more. downvotes).
I don’t know what opinions people have about the implementation. I think, for example, most people on the team think that agreement voting is quite good, that having weak/strong votes is good, and that our vote scaling is good.
For “robust”, I think most people think it fails sometimes on the actual website, and not just in possible corner cases.
I appreciate your explanation of your explanation of your downvote.
I expect these kinds of problems to be solved by the LW karma system and the “off-topic?” reacts. I believe the LW karma system is robust, well-implemented, and generally used very properly by users. I also believe it typically functions very well in terms of elevating desirable comments and punishing/downgrading lower-value ones. It’s not perfect, but it’s not only better than literally every other comment ranking system I have come across, but also perfectly adequate (IMO) to handle potential hijacking situations.
I am struck by the extent to which you, as a mod running this site and implementing this very system, don’t seem to agree with me on this. If it was just this one comment, I wouldn’t say much. But I recall @habryka also said at some point during the unfortunate kerfuffle a month and a half ago:
And also:
Is this something the entire LW mod team agrees with, broadly? It seems entirely incompatible with my own experience on this site.
I think you’re asking if the whole mod team agrees with “the LW karma system is NOT robust, well-implemented and generally used very properly by users”.
I think in general the LW team thinks that the karma system is generally used properly by users (not sure about “very properly”, for example I think we’re probably not skilled enough, as a userbase, at using it. Habryka might even disagree with “properly”, because he so strongly wants more. downvotes).
I don’t know what opinions people have about the implementation. I think, for example, most people on the team think that agreement voting is quite good, that having weak/strong votes is good, and that our vote scaling is good.
For “robust”, I think most people think it fails sometimes on the actual website, and not just in possible corner cases.