The issue is specifically that there’s a distinction between “how much we want people to feel rewarded as they engage with the site”, and “how much power over the culture and attentional direction of the site.” I think the former should be quite liberal, because that’s how motivation curves work. The latter currently seems inflated.
One (perhaps false) assumption I had was that people didn’t pay as much attention to total karma (esp. on LW2.0 where you have to go out of your way to see it on your profile), so it wouldn’t feel as much like a punishment.
By now I’ve updated a bit about which downvotes are most relevant (see Robby comment), but some additional possibilities include:
not directly apply the penalty, but rather add… some kind of karma debt, or something, that ends up mostly invisible? So a person doesn’t see themselves going down in karma, but to raise their karma past their current point requires additional upvotes (or weight upvotes less until you’ve repaid the debt or something)
have this sort of penalty only kick in once you hit a certain level of karma (at least 100, maybe 500 or 1000) so that your initial experience isn’t additionally frustrating.
I like looking at my total karma too, partly because I like knowing about votes on my comments and if total karma hasn’t changed then I assume I haven’t received any votes recently.
I discussed this a bit with Turntrout, and one solution (that comes with its own problems) is some kind of karma-decay function that has you lose some fraction of your karma on a continuous basis. This would make the karma more similar to ranking systems in many online games, where the rate at which you can gain points determines your final stable ranking, instead of just the amount of time you play.
I really like the idea of a karma floor. Under some threshold (100, maybe higher), downvotes don’t count against you. You could provide a report to admins showing posters who would be hugely negative without this, so they can take administrative action against the serious problems. I’d love to see per-post and per-comment floors as well—no comment should get much below −15 unless it’s pure spam or hatred, in which case the moderator should remove it.
The issue is specifically that there’s a distinction between “how much we want people to feel rewarded as they engage with the site”, and “how much power over the culture and attentional direction of the site.” I think the former should be quite liberal, because that’s how motivation curves work. The latter currently seems inflated.
One (perhaps false) assumption I had was that people didn’t pay as much attention to total karma (esp. on LW2.0 where you have to go out of your way to see it on your profile), so it wouldn’t feel as much like a punishment.
By now I’ve updated a bit about which downvotes are most relevant (see Robby comment), but some additional possibilities include:
not directly apply the penalty, but rather add… some kind of karma debt, or something, that ends up mostly invisible? So a person doesn’t see themselves going down in karma, but to raise their karma past their current point requires additional upvotes (or weight upvotes less until you’ve repaid the debt or something)
have this sort of penalty only kick in once you hit a certain level of karma (at least 100, maybe 500 or 1000) so that your initial experience isn’t additionally frustrating.
FYI I am still pretty attentive to my total karma, mostly because I want to know where I am in relation to the cutoffs for extra voting power.
I like looking at my total karma too, partly because I like knowing about votes on my comments and if total karma hasn’t changed then I assume I haven’t received any votes recently.
I discussed this a bit with Turntrout, and one solution (that comes with its own problems) is some kind of karma-decay function that has you lose some fraction of your karma on a continuous basis. This would make the karma more similar to ranking systems in many online games, where the rate at which you can gain points determines your final stable ranking, instead of just the amount of time you play.
I really like the idea of a karma floor. Under some threshold (100, maybe higher), downvotes don’t count against you. You could provide a report to admins showing posters who would be hugely negative without this, so they can take administrative action against the serious problems. I’d love to see per-post and per-comment floors as well—no comment should get much below −15 unless it’s pure spam or hatred, in which case the moderator should remove it.