We no longer weigh frontpage posts 10x, though we might want to reinstitute some kind of weighing again. I think the 10x was historically too much, and made it so that by far the primary determinant of who had how much karma was how many frontpage posts you had, which felt like it undervalued comments, but it’s pretty plausible (and even likely to me) that the current system is now too skewed in the other direction.
My current relationship towards karma is something like: The point of karma for comments is to provide local information in a thread about a mixture of importance, quality and readership, and it’s pretty hard to disentangle those without making the system much more complex. Overall the karma of a post is a pretty good guess on how many people will want to read it, so it makes sense to use it for some recommendation systems, but the karma of comments feel a lot more noisy to me. As a long-term reward I think we shouldn’t really rely on karma at all and instead use systems like the LessWrong review to establish in a much more considered way which posts were actually good.
We’ve also deemphasized how much karma someone has on the site quite a bit because I don’t want to create the impression that it’s at all a robust measure of the quality of someone’s contributions. So, for example, we no longer have karma leaderboards.
We no longer weigh frontpage posts 10x, though we might want to reinstitute some kind of weighing again. I think the 10x was historically too much, and made it so that by far the primary determinant of who had how much karma was how many frontpage posts you had, which felt like it undervalued comments, but it’s pretty plausible (and even likely to me) that the current system is now too skewed in the other direction.
My current relationship towards karma is something like: The point of karma for comments is to provide local information in a thread about a mixture of importance, quality and readership, and it’s pretty hard to disentangle those without making the system much more complex. Overall the karma of a post is a pretty good guess on how many people will want to read it, so it makes sense to use it for some recommendation systems, but the karma of comments feel a lot more noisy to me. As a long-term reward I think we shouldn’t really rely on karma at all and instead use systems like the LessWrong review to establish in a much more considered way which posts were actually good.
We’ve also deemphasized how much karma someone has on the site quite a bit because I don’t want to create the impression that it’s at all a robust measure of the quality of someone’s contributions. So, for example, we no longer have karma leaderboards.