Scaled voting power is part of why moderation on the Forum is sustainable. When I see posts downvoted past zero I agree the majority of the time. Karma is an imperfect but still very helpful measure of how useful a writer has been to the EA Forum community. Therefore, high karma correlates pretty well with people having good Forum content taste.
I disagree with the “groupthink” idea because I don’t see strong downvotes being used to suppress good, on-topic content the majority of the time (when I do, I strong upvote it). I can imagine a world where this system did go wrong (if high karma users represent an old orthodoxy that new users wanted to move past for example). But I don’t see this issue in reality.
Definitely open to hearing more about this and seeing examples of the system going wrong! And thanks for raising the question Henry :)
Scaled voting power is part of why moderation on the Forum is sustainable
On a typical day the forum has like 10 posts and like 30 comments. A subreddit like r/excel is roughly 3 times as active as this forum, and is moderated entirely by volunteers. I do not think it would be very difficult to moderate the forum without a karma system if people chose to do so.
Therefore, high karma correlates pretty well with people having good Forum content taste.
I would say the people with the most karma are the people who comment a lot with a content that is in line with the tone of the forum. This seems like it serves to reinforce the status quo of forum norms. Whether this is a good or bad thing will depend on your opinion of said norms: for example, I would prefer this place be a bit more tolerant of humour and levity.
I directionally agree, but the system does need to also perform well in spikes like FTX, the Bostrom controversy, critical major news stories, and so on. I doubt those are an issue on r/excel.
I’ll call the role of voters in voting posts/comments below zero / off the frontpage / to be collapsed in comments “cloture voting” for short. As the name implies, I see that role as cutting off or at least curtailing discussion—which is sometimes a necessary function, of course.
Scaled voting power is part of why moderation on the Forum is sustainable. When I see posts downvoted past zero I agree the majority of the time.
While I agree that cloture voting serves a pseudo-moderation function, is there evidence that the results are better with heavily scaled voting power than they would be with less-scaled power?
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As applied to cloture voting, I have mixed feelings on the degree of scaling in the abstract. In practice, I think many of the downsides come (1) the ability of users to arbitrarily decide when and how often to cast strongvotes and (2) net karma being the mere result of adding up votes.
On point 1, I note that someone with 100 karma could exercise more influence over vote totals than I do with a +9 strongvote, simply by strongvoting significantly more than I do. This would be even easier with 1000 karma, because the voter would have the same standard vote as I. In the end, people can self-nominate themselves for greater power merely by increasing their willingness to click-and-hold (or click twice on mobile). I find that more concerning than the scaling issue.
On point 2, the following sample equations seem generally undesirable to me:
(A) three strongvotes at −9, −8, and −7, combined with nine +2 standard votes = −6 net karma
(B) five strongvotes at −6, combined with four strongvotes at +6 = −6 net karma
There’s a reason cloture requires a supermajority vote in most parliamentary manuals. And those reasons may be even more pronounced here, where the early votes are only a fraction of the total potential votes—and I sense are not always representative either!
In (2A), there appears to be a minority viewpoint whose adherents are using strongvotes to hide content the significant majority of voters believe to be a positive contribution. Yes, those voters could respond with strongvotes of their own. But they don’t know they are in the majority and that their viewpoint is being overridden by 1⁄3 or less of a strongvoter’s opinion.
In (2B), the community is closely divided and there is no consensus for cloture. But the use of strongvotes makes the karma total come out negative enough to hide a comment (IIRC).
One could envision encoding special rules to mitigate these concerns, such as:
A post or comment’s display is governed by its cloture-adjusted karma, in which at most one-third of the votes on either side count as strong. So where the only downvotes are −9, −8, −7, they would count as −9, −2, −2.
In addition to negative karma, cloture requires a greater number of downvotes than upvotes, the exact fraction varying a bit based on the total votes cast. For example, I don’t think 4-3 should be enough for cloture, but 40-30 would be.
A few quick thoughts:
Scaled voting power is part of why moderation on the Forum is sustainable. When I see posts downvoted past zero I agree the majority of the time.
Karma is an imperfect but still very helpful measure of how useful a writer has been to the EA Forum community. Therefore, high karma correlates pretty well with people having good Forum content taste.
I disagree with the “groupthink” idea because I don’t see strong downvotes being used to suppress good, on-topic content the majority of the time (when I do, I strong upvote it). I can imagine a world where this system did go wrong (if high karma users represent an old orthodoxy that new users wanted to move past for example). But I don’t see this issue in reality.
Definitely open to hearing more about this and seeing examples of the system going wrong! And thanks for raising the question Henry :)
On a typical day the forum has like 10 posts and like 30 comments. A subreddit like r/excel is roughly 3 times as active as this forum, and is moderated entirely by volunteers. I do not think it would be very difficult to moderate the forum without a karma system if people chose to do so.
I would say the people with the most karma are the people who comment a lot with a content that is in line with the tone of the forum. This seems like it serves to reinforce the status quo of forum norms. Whether this is a good or bad thing will depend on your opinion of said norms: for example, I would prefer this place be a bit more tolerant of humour and levity.
I directionally agree, but the system does need to also perform well in spikes like FTX, the Bostrom controversy, critical major news stories, and so on. I doubt those are an issue on r/excel.
Am hoping the new “made me laugh” reaction might help on the humour and levity front, but haven’t seen it used much yet outside of April Fools.
As someone who moderates a large community I agree with this! Moderation is hard and can be a thankless task, how I wish Slack had a similar system:)
I’ll call the role of voters in voting posts/comments below zero / off the frontpage / to be collapsed in comments “cloture voting” for short. As the name implies, I see that role as cutting off or at least curtailing discussion—which is sometimes a necessary function, of course.
While I agree that cloture voting serves a pseudo-moderation function, is there evidence that the results are better with heavily scaled voting power than they would be with less-scaled power?
~~
As applied to cloture voting, I have mixed feelings on the degree of scaling in the abstract. In practice, I think many of the downsides come (1) the ability of users to arbitrarily decide when and how often to cast strongvotes and (2) net karma being the mere result of adding up votes.
On point 1, I note that someone with 100 karma could exercise more influence over vote totals than I do with a +9 strongvote, simply by strongvoting significantly more than I do. This would be even easier with 1000 karma, because the voter would have the same standard vote as I. In the end, people can self-nominate themselves for greater power merely by increasing their willingness to click-and-hold (or click twice on mobile). I find that more concerning than the scaling issue.
On point 2, the following sample equations seem generally undesirable to me:
(A) three strongvotes at −9, −8, and −7, combined with nine +2 standard votes = −6 net karma
(B) five strongvotes at −6, combined with four strongvotes at +6 = −6 net karma
There’s a reason cloture requires a supermajority vote in most parliamentary manuals. And those reasons may be even more pronounced here, where the early votes are only a fraction of the total potential votes—and I sense are not always representative either!
In (2A), there appears to be a minority viewpoint whose adherents are using strongvotes to hide content the significant majority of voters believe to be a positive contribution. Yes, those voters could respond with strongvotes of their own. But they don’t know they are in the majority and that their viewpoint is being overridden by 1⁄3 or less of a strongvoter’s opinion.
In (2B), the community is closely divided and there is no consensus for cloture. But the use of strongvotes makes the karma total come out negative enough to hide a comment (IIRC).
One could envision encoding special rules to mitigate these concerns, such as:
A post or comment’s display is governed by its cloture-adjusted karma, in which at most one-third of the votes on either side count as strong. So where the only downvotes are −9, −8, −7, they would count as −9, −2, −2.
In addition to negative karma, cloture requires a greater number of downvotes than upvotes, the exact fraction varying a bit based on the total votes cast. For example, I don’t think 4-3 should be enough for cloture, but 40-30 would be.