I agree that people have preferences about vote sums, and that each individual’s preferences can be better realized through strategic voting. The crux is that I think that strategic voting worsens our ability to estimate the collective opinion of LW on a post. Strategic voters act to absorb votes past a certain point that they choose, which means that the added presence of non-strategic voters may not have any effect on the total vote. (Also note the order dependence, which probably indicates something wrong.) Perhaps we could accept these costs in exchange for some gain, but I don’t see what collective gain there is from strategic voting.
Perhaps we could accept these costs in exchange for some gain, but I don’t see what collective gain there is from strategic voting.
Vote total from strategic voting can better reflect a post or comment’s quality as opposed to its quality*readership (number of people who read a post/comment), which is what you would get if people did non-strategic voting. With the latter, it’s hard to tell whether a post’s vote total is high because people think it’s very high quality, or if it’s just moderately high quality but read (and hence voted on) by a lot of people.
I’ve changed my mind—I think strategic voting might send more information than karma-blind voting. It counteracts visibility spirals as you describe. There might also be another effect: consider a community of identical, deterministic, karma-blind voters. Disregarding visibility spirals, everything gets sorted into five categories (corresponding to the number of ways for a single user to vote). In reality, deterministic and karma-blind voters aren’t identical, so karma still varies smoothly. But is “people are different” the only way information should be sent? Doesn’t a group of identical voters hold more than a quint of useful information? This is why I have a vague suspicion that strategic voters can send more information—they send more information in a degenerate case.
The thing is that any system needs to be resilient against people strategic voting (with people having different goals and opinions about how to vote and why). Given that at least a nontrivial chunk of people vote this way, if we don’t want them to, it seems like the preferred solution is to change the voting system so that it no longer incentivizes that in the first place.
I agree with this statement, but I don’t think you have as much control as you like about people’s perception of votes, and what the incentive actually is for diverse individuals.
My incentives in voting are:
encourage more posts by new and not-yet-established posters. Getting someone into the low hundreds so they’re comfortable is a priority here.
encourage BETTER posts from a given poster, rather than encouraging more posts from some and fewer than others. How to do this is idiosyncratic based on what else the poster has posted and what reactions and comments have been given in the past. Usually comments and PMs are more effective than votes.
mark truly negative-value posts (spam and incoherent, as opposed to just imperfect) to get it noticed and removed by mods.
I think people perceive different types of vote systems fairly differently. I’m actually talking about bigger changes than you’re probably thinking of.
If I wanted to incentivize voters to “vote their true beliefs without regard for the rest of social consensus” (what Wakalix seems to be describing, and which I think is orthogonal to the set of things you’re talking about – you’re pointing at what posting behavior the votes should incentivize, and I think Wakalix is talking more about voting behavior), I would:
a) hide the karma before they vote
b) use something closer to a 1-5 star rating system (not precisely that, but closer). I think this would dramatically change the relationship with voting, and would much more naturally output the the voting behavior that Wakalix describes.
I agree that people have preferences about vote sums, and that each individual’s preferences can be better realized through strategic voting. The crux is that I think that strategic voting worsens our ability to estimate the collective opinion of LW on a post. Strategic voters act to absorb votes past a certain point that they choose, which means that the added presence of non-strategic voters may not have any effect on the total vote. (Also note the order dependence, which probably indicates something wrong.) Perhaps we could accept these costs in exchange for some gain, but I don’t see what collective gain there is from strategic voting.
Vote total from strategic voting can better reflect a post or comment’s quality as opposed to its quality*readership (number of people who read a post/comment), which is what you would get if people did non-strategic voting. With the latter, it’s hard to tell whether a post’s vote total is high because people think it’s very high quality, or if it’s just moderately high quality but read (and hence voted on) by a lot of people.
I’ve changed my mind—I think strategic voting might send more information than karma-blind voting. It counteracts visibility spirals as you describe. There might also be another effect: consider a community of identical, deterministic, karma-blind voters. Disregarding visibility spirals, everything gets sorted into five categories (corresponding to the number of ways for a single user to vote). In reality, deterministic and karma-blind voters aren’t identical, so karma still varies smoothly. But is “people are different” the only way information should be sent? Doesn’t a group of identical voters hold more than a quint of useful information? This is why I have a vague suspicion that strategic voters can send more information—they send more information in a degenerate case.
The thing is that any system needs to be resilient against people strategic voting (with people having different goals and opinions about how to vote and why). Given that at least a nontrivial chunk of people vote this way, if we don’t want them to, it seems like the preferred solution is to change the voting system so that it no longer incentivizes that in the first place.
I agree with this statement, but I don’t think you have as much control as you like about people’s perception of votes, and what the incentive actually is for diverse individuals.
My incentives in voting are:
encourage more posts by new and not-yet-established posters. Getting someone into the low hundreds so they’re comfortable is a priority here.
encourage BETTER posts from a given poster, rather than encouraging more posts from some and fewer than others. How to do this is idiosyncratic based on what else the poster has posted and what reactions and comments have been given in the past. Usually comments and PMs are more effective than votes.
mark truly negative-value posts (spam and incoherent, as opposed to just imperfect) to get it noticed and removed by mods.
I think people perceive different types of vote systems fairly differently. I’m actually talking about bigger changes than you’re probably thinking of.
If I wanted to incentivize voters to “vote their true beliefs without regard for the rest of social consensus” (what Wakalix seems to be describing, and which I think is orthogonal to the set of things you’re talking about – you’re pointing at what posting behavior the votes should incentivize, and I think Wakalix is talking more about voting behavior), I would:
a) hide the karma before they vote
b) use something closer to a 1-5 star rating system (not precisely that, but closer). I think this would dramatically change the relationship with voting, and would much more naturally output the the voting behavior that Wakalix describes.