Inspired by this: what if the link for comments to a post included a comment karma total divided by the number of comments ratio?
This would also be handy for comments with an individual score below threshold.
Inspired by this: what if the link for comments to a post included a comment karma total divided by the number of comments ratio?
This would also be handy for comments with an individual score below threshold.
Sounds like it would have self reinforcing feedback problems. I’ve certainly found that placement and traffic in the threads they’re posted in is at least as powerful a predictor of my comments’ upvotes as my perception of their quality, probably more so.
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I think early comments are more likely to attract karma than later comments. Have you noticed other patterns?
You could be right about self-reinforcing feedback—people would be less likely to comment to articles with low average comment karma.
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Well, some threads simply get more traffic than others; any post that generates abundant discussion is more likely to generate highly upvoted discussion, which means threads like Curi’s Critical Rationalism threads would appear as having "high quality" discussion when in fact they contained very little worth reading, and may even have been a response to a deliberate trolling.
And of course, it’s well known that Eliezer has a karma wake, since any comment that his own comments call attention to will get a large influx of readers. Recently, one of my own comments which had been stable at +2 till a few hours after I posted it shot up to +7 when Eliezer replied to the parent. Other posters like Yvain may generate similar effects.
I would say I rarely downvote, partly because I’m not quite sure how one should view karma; one alternative is that it should reflect some form of very crude statistics of peoples opinions of a post/comment, no matter if the post has −4 or 100 you vote it up if you think it’s a good post or vote it down if you think it’s bad one. Another alternative is that karma reflects how many points a post/comment should have, that is if a comment has −2 and your preference value is 0 you vote it up.
Could someone help me clarify how one should view karma?
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People express both opinions, or more often a mix of the two. In practice if a substantial number are acting according to the later one, that is enough to make it dominant.
If people act according to the simple strategy, and assume others act according to it, one can have disproportionate apparent influence by strategically voting towards a target. The more people that act strategically, the more likely it is votes according to the simple strategy will get cancelled out, even by people who substantially agree.
Because of these incentives, I think it best to mostly vote towards a target.
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Thanks, good to know there isn’t any outspoken rule of how one ought to view karma in that aspect. But then when are you allowed to downvote? Obviously when someones argument is unsound or when a comment do not actually add something to discussion, but is it "OK" downvote if you just strongly disagree, for example if someone makes a good case for eating babies, that is to say based upon that persons assumptions about the world eating babies is (EDIT: not) a bad thing, lets say "since babies are not conscious it’s okay to eat them" (I’m not implying that the statement harbors any truth).
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That’s a good question, so I upvoted this post.
Then I decided to downvote the first comment you wrote on or after October 15th, because fuck your first comment on or after October 15th! unless in it you advocated eating babies.
Then I read it and decided that advocating pesticide was close enough, because weeds are people too, and undid my downvote.
See also here and especially the comments.
I think the popular recycling ad slogan "don’t mess with karma" applies here.
Losing one’s purpose is already very easy on LW, given that the karma score provides an instant emotional feedback. Some get worried or even obsessed with it, losing sight of what brought them here to begin with: learning rationality and being a part of the community. Some even delete their accounts after a negative reaction to their posts.
In short, the karma feedback is already strong enough, make it even stronger would render it less useful.
Generally speaking, arbitrarily constructed statistics are useless.
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Some arbitrarily constructed statistics are more useless than others.
More substantially, the metric that is being proposed gives one an idea of proportionally what people think of something. A post that say has +10 karma and 200 comments is a different situation from a +50 post with 10 comments. But I’m not completely sure what the distinction would mean without more knowledge of the social structure and voting patterns of the typical LWians.
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I may not have been clear about what I meant. I was thinking of an additional number which doesn’t include the karma for the post. It’s strictly about the comments.
If a discussion has 100 comments with an average of 4 points each (I think this would be on the very high side), the discussion is likely to be worth reading, even if the post only has 10 points itself. If a post has 50 points, but the discussion only has an average of .75 points per comment (I think this would be on the very low side), then the post might be more worth reading, but the comments might be worth skipping unless you have hopes of a good sub-thread.