Strong-upvoted, mostly because I had a positive system-1 reaction to the line “I really hate the focus on karma.” I was going to straightforwardly agree with it, but then thought about it some more and came up with the following:
@ mostly the mod team: I’m not necessarily sure I grok why this site seems to care so much about karma, and I’m curious about it. I’m getting the impression that maybe it’s more important than I thought though, as a tool for guiding site culture. Like, every time I see a post talking about changing the karma system, my first thought is “Whoah, isn’t this way overthinking it? Why is this such an important issue?” Then I remind myself “oh, yeah, maybe it’s for shaping site culture, which is important I guess, so maybe this is important.” But then the next time I have the same system 1 reaction of “Why bother caring about karma so much?” Now I’m new here, and wasn’t around for the death of old-LW (I came in around the time LW2 started), so maybe this is just due to the fact that “LW dying” isn’t a particularly salient possibility for me, so I’m not worried so much about the nitty-gritty details of how to shape incentive gradients on the site so that doesn’t happen.
I would also say my intuitive reaction is that low-positive karma seems the right place for neutral comments. I’m not sure I like the “levels” idea, just because I don’t know how to determine what level I want a comment to be at on a scale that goes from -infinity to +infinity.
Appreciate spelling out your reasons and thoughts here.
I think, ideally, karma would fade into the background and not be something people overly worry about. BUT we still need a way to determine what posts get what level of visibility.
I think you mostly answer the question the way I would have – we think maintaining (and improving!) the site culture is really important, and this should ideally be as seamless a part of the site as possible.
I basically agree about low-positive karma being correct for what you see on a given comment. The question is about how the karma for that comment should translate into your longterm ability to influence the site. The easiest way to hand out higher-level privileges is automatically based on total karma. There are other ways one could think about this.
[Edit: I’d add that I see us as fortunate enough to have a dedicated userbase that cares about getting online discussion right, and this provides a rare an valuable opportunity to experiment.
Looking at most of the internet, you can see how technology shapes discussion. The sort of conversation that twitter incentivizes is different than what facebook incentivizes is different from what reddit incentivies – but all of those also share certain features by optimizing along a sort of “lowest common denominator” axis. Simple karma systems encourage posts with mass appeal, which isn’t necessarily the same as high-quality discussion.
LessWrong has the potential to deliberately engineer a platform and culture that is robustly focused on high quality discourse. Our approaches to this manifest as a lot of discussion of karma, but one of the underlying pieces of that is an approach to experimentation]
Strong-upvoted, mostly because I had a positive system-1 reaction to the line “I really hate the focus on karma.” I was going to straightforwardly agree with it, but then thought about it some more and came up with the following:
@ mostly the mod team: I’m not necessarily sure I grok why this site seems to care so much about karma, and I’m curious about it. I’m getting the impression that maybe it’s more important than I thought though, as a tool for guiding site culture. Like, every time I see a post talking about changing the karma system, my first thought is “Whoah, isn’t this way overthinking it? Why is this such an important issue?” Then I remind myself “oh, yeah, maybe it’s for shaping site culture, which is important I guess, so maybe this is important.” But then the next time I have the same system 1 reaction of “Why bother caring about karma so much?” Now I’m new here, and wasn’t around for the death of old-LW (I came in around the time LW2 started), so maybe this is just due to the fact that “LW dying” isn’t a particularly salient possibility for me, so I’m not worried so much about the nitty-gritty details of how to shape incentive gradients on the site so that doesn’t happen.
I would also say my intuitive reaction is that low-positive karma seems the right place for neutral comments. I’m not sure I like the “levels” idea, just because I don’t know how to determine what level I want a comment to be at on a scale that goes from -infinity to +infinity.
Appreciate spelling out your reasons and thoughts here.
I think, ideally, karma would fade into the background and not be something people overly worry about. BUT we still need a way to determine what posts get what level of visibility.
I think you mostly answer the question the way I would have – we think maintaining (and improving!) the site culture is really important, and this should ideally be as seamless a part of the site as possible.
I basically agree about low-positive karma being correct for what you see on a given comment. The question is about how the karma for that comment should translate into your longterm ability to influence the site. The easiest way to hand out higher-level privileges is automatically based on total karma. There are other ways one could think about this.
[Edit: I’d add that I see us as fortunate enough to have a dedicated userbase that cares about getting online discussion right, and this provides a rare an valuable opportunity to experiment.
Looking at most of the internet, you can see how technology shapes discussion. The sort of conversation that twitter incentivizes is different than what facebook incentivizes is different from what reddit incentivies – but all of those also share certain features by optimizing along a sort of “lowest common denominator” axis. Simple karma systems encourage posts with mass appeal, which isn’t necessarily the same as high-quality discussion.
LessWrong has the potential to deliberately engineer a platform and culture that is robustly focused on high quality discourse. Our approaches to this manifest as a lot of discussion of karma, but one of the underlying pieces of that is an approach to experimentation]