I almost didn’t make an account here at all because I was put off by how removed and cold the community seemed. I know of at least one person who wants to post, but is still too nervous. Magnifying downvotes would worsen this problem. If the average poster submitting decent (but not earth-shattering) content averages 0 karma per comment, the negative ones are going to sting. We all know about risk aversion, and I imagine it holds even more for status in a highly-critical community. In turn, this probably will drive people from the site (if 0 is the new average karma).
To me, 0 karma implies “no one cares”—not “average”; likewise, negative doesn’t just connote “subpar”, but actually terrible. I think it’s fantastic that people can post and gain karma and feel good. It’d probably just be better to scrutinize post histories more when making moderation decisions.
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.
I think it’s fantastic that people can post and gain karma and feel good.
I can hardly overstate how profoundly wrong and misguided this attitude seems to me. As far as I can tell, this is antithetical to the entire point of a forum like this.
For whatever it’s worth, the sentence above seems true to me, so I would be interested in you elaborating your point. It seems clear to me that we want a positive reward curve for contributions. Without a reward (of some form or another) people will not post to the site. Being part of that reward is the whole point of karma on Reddit and many other websites that use karma systems (and Reddit is after all where our karma system comes from). In our case, we are also adding an additional dimension of giving power to users with a lot of karma, but the dimension of karma serving as positive incentive for posting is definitely still an important function.
I actually had the thought of “I think Said will disagree with me on this, but I forget why” while writing that comment. Like habryka, I’m interested in hearing why you find that misguided; I’ll keep an eye out for a reply to either comment (if you choose to explain further).
I strongly disagree.
I almost didn’t make an account here at all because I was put off by how removed and cold the community seemed. I know of at least one person who wants to post, but is still too nervous. Magnifying downvotes would worsen this problem. If the average poster submitting decent (but not earth-shattering) content averages 0 karma per comment, the negative ones are going to sting. We all know about risk aversion, and I imagine it holds even more for status in a highly-critical community. In turn, this probably will drive people from the site (if 0 is the new average karma).
To me, 0 karma implies “no one cares”—not “average”; likewise, negative doesn’t just connote “subpar”, but actually terrible. I think it’s fantastic that people can post and gain karma and feel good. It’d probably just be better to scrutinize post histories more when making moderation decisions.
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.
I can hardly overstate how profoundly wrong and misguided this attitude seems to me. As far as I can tell, this is antithetical to the entire point of a forum like this.
For whatever it’s worth, the sentence above seems true to me, so I would be interested in you elaborating your point. It seems clear to me that we want a positive reward curve for contributions. Without a reward (of some form or another) people will not post to the site. Being part of that reward is the whole point of karma on Reddit and many other websites that use karma systems (and Reddit is after all where our karma system comes from). In our case, we are also adding an additional dimension of giving power to users with a lot of karma, but the dimension of karma serving as positive incentive for posting is definitely still an important function.
I actually had the thought of “I think Said will disagree with me on this, but I forget why” while writing that comment. Like habryka, I’m interested in hearing why you find that misguided; I’ll keep an eye out for a reply to either comment (if you choose to explain further).