Posting that checklist as a poll in each new post would likely end up irritating people.
A simpler approach, with the twin advantages of being simpler and being something one can do unilaterally, would be to just count the proportion of recent, non-meetup-related Discussion posts with positive karma. Then you could give potential post authors an encouraging reference class forecast like “85% of non-meetup Discussion posts get positive karma”.
You know what? That is simple and elegant. I like that about it… but in the worst case scenario, that will encourage people to post stuff without thinking about it because they’ll make the hasty generalization that “All non-meetup posts have an 85% chance of getting some karma” and even in the best case scenario, a lot of people will probably be thinking something along the lines of “Just because Yvain and Gwern and people who are really good at this get positive karma doesn’t mean that I will.”
Posting that checklist as a poll in each new post would likely end up irritating people.
A simpler approach, with the twin advantages of being simpler and being something one can do unilaterally, would be to just count the proportion of recent, non-meetup-related Discussion posts with positive karma. Then you could give potential post authors an encouraging reference class forecast like “85% of non-meetup Discussion posts get positive karma”.
You know what? That is simple and elegant. I like that about it… but in the worst case scenario, that will encourage people to post stuff without thinking about it because they’ll make the hasty generalization that “All non-meetup posts have an 85% chance of getting some karma” and even in the best case scenario, a lot of people will probably be thinking something along the lines of “Just because Yvain and Gwern and people who are really good at this get positive karma doesn’t mean that I will.”
Unfortunately, I think it would be ineffective.
Fair points.