I don’t think we should only downvote harmful things, we should instead look at the amount of karma and use our votes to push the score to the value we think the post should be at.
I downvoted the comment because:
Saying things like ”… obviously push an agenda....” And “I’m pretty sure anyone reading this… ” Has persuasiony vibes which I don’t like.
Saying “this post says people should defer to authority” is a bit of a straw/weak man and isn’t very charitable.
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.
(I think that the pushing towards a score thing wasn’t a crux in downvoting, I think there are lots of reasons to downvote things that aren’t harmful as outlined in the ‘how to use the form post/moderator guidelines’)
I think that karma is supposed to be a proxy for the relative value that a post provides.
I’m not sure what you mean by zero-sum here, but I would have thought that the control system type approach is better as the steady-state values will be pushed towards the mean of what users see as the true value of the post. I think that this score + total number of votes is quite easy to interpret.
The everyone voting independently thing performs poorly when some posts have much more views than others (so it seems to be tracking something more like how many people saw it and liked it rather than is the post high quality).
I think I misunderstand your concern, but the control system approach seems, on the surface to be much better to me, but I am keen to find the crux here, if there is one.
I don’t think we should only downvote harmful things, we should instead look at the amount of karma and use our votes to push the score to the value we think the post should be at.
I downvoted the comment because:
Saying things like ”… obviously push an agenda....” And “I’m pretty sure anyone reading this… ” Has persuasiony vibes which I don’t like.
Saying “this post says people should defer to authority” is a bit of a straw/weak man and isn’t very charitable.
Using votes to push towards the score we think it should be at sounds worse than just individually voting according to some thresholds of how good/helpful/whatever a post needs to be? I’m worried about zero sum (so really negative sum because of the effort) attempts to move karma around where different people are pushing in different ways, where it’s hard to know how to interpret the results, compared to people straightforwardly voting without regard to others’ votes.
At least, if we should be voting to push things towards our best guess I think the karma system should be reformed to something that plays nice with that—e.g. each individual gives their preferred score, and the displayed karma is the median.
(I think that the pushing towards a score thing wasn’t a crux in downvoting, I think there are lots of reasons to downvote things that aren’t harmful as outlined in the ‘how to use the form post/moderator guidelines’)
I think that karma is supposed to be a proxy for the relative value that a post provides.
I’m not sure what you mean by zero-sum here, but I would have thought that the control system type approach is better as the steady-state values will be pushed towards the mean of what users see as the true value of the post. I think that this score + total number of votes is quite easy to interpret.
The everyone voting independently thing performs poorly when some posts have much more views than others (so it seems to be tracking something more like how many people saw it and liked it rather than is the post high quality).
I think I misunderstand your concern, but the control system approach seems, on the surface to be much better to me, but I am keen to find the crux here, if there is one.