EA Forum posts have been pretty effective in changing community direction in the past, so the downside risk seems low
But giving more voting power to people with lots of karma entrenches the position/​influence of people who are already high in the community based on its current direction, so it would be an obstacle to the possibility of influencing the community through forum posts.
If you think it’s important for forum posts to be able to change community direction, you should be against vote power scaling with karma.
This presupposes that the way something gets to change community direction is by having high karma, while I think it’s actually about being well reasoned and persuasive AND being viewed. Being high karma helps it be viewed, but this is neutral to actively negative if the post is low quality/​flawed—that just entrenches people in their positions more/​makes them think less of the forum. So in order for this change to help, there must be valuable posts that are low karma that would be high karma if voting was more democratic—I personally think that the current system is better at selecting for quality and this outweighs any penalty to dissenting opinions, which I would guess is fairly minor in practice
I think my view is that while I agree in principle it could be an issue, the voting has worked this way for long enough that I’d expect more evidence of entrenching to exist. Instead, I still see controversial ideas change people’s minds on the forum pretty regularly and not be downvoted to oblivion, and see low quality or bad faith posts/​comments get negative karma, and I think that’s the upside of the system working well.
But giving more voting power to people with lots of karma entrenches the position/​influence of people who are already high in the community based on its current direction, so it would be an obstacle to the possibility of influencing the community through forum posts.
If you think it’s important for forum posts to be able to change community direction, you should be against vote power scaling with karma.
This presupposes that the way something gets to change community direction is by having high karma, while I think it’s actually about being well reasoned and persuasive AND being viewed. Being high karma helps it be viewed, but this is neutral to actively negative if the post is low quality/​flawed—that just entrenches people in their positions more/​makes them think less of the forum. So in order for this change to help, there must be valuable posts that are low karma that would be high karma if voting was more democratic—I personally think that the current system is better at selecting for quality and this outweighs any penalty to dissenting opinions, which I would guess is fairly minor in practice
I think my view is that while I agree in principle it could be an issue, the voting has worked this way for long enough that I’d expect more evidence of entrenching to exist. Instead, I still see controversial ideas change people’s minds on the forum pretty regularly and not be downvoted to oblivion, and see low quality or bad faith posts/​comments get negative karma, and I think that’s the upside of the system working well.