Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening
Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.
Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author’s name (If your name is “Holden Karnofsky” and I’ve read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if your name is “OddHappy153″). This creates a disadvantage for newcomers and infrequent posters.
Idea: for the first X time, don’t show the karma of the posts (unless it has really many downvotes). Maybe don’t show the author’s name on the frontpage either. Or hide it until the user explicitly clicks on “show author”.
Oh. This exactly equivalent to what I suggested in Occlumency.
So to affect ordinal rankings, you need to deal with information cascades in real-time.
One way to do this could be to hide authorship and karma for 24 hours (or something) after the post has been published. Readers are now spread more evenly across day-one posts, which means that on day two, their relative karmas are more indicative of true conversion rates and less influenced by randomness and author popularity. So even if you let everything run as normal thenceforth, the information cascades would start on initial conditions that better reflect true conversion rates.
People seem to be converging on this as a suggestion, so I definitely think it would be good to test run it for a while. I’m not optimistic about it being net positive, however, but I think testing it could be usefwl.
Honestly, I’m pessimistic about the value of the frontpage, and I prefer searching for things to read by browsing tags.
Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening
Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.
Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author’s name (If your name is “Holden Karnofsky” and I’ve read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if your name is “OddHappy153″). This creates a disadvantage for newcomers and infrequent posters.
Idea: for the first X time, don’t show the karma of the posts (unless it has really many downvotes). Maybe don’t show the author’s name on the frontpage either. Or hide it until the user explicitly clicks on “show author”.
Oh. This exactly equivalent to what I suggested in Occlumency.
People seem to be converging on this as a suggestion, so I definitely think it would be good to test run it for a while. I’m not optimistic about it being net positive, however, but I think testing it could be usefwl.
Honestly, I’m pessimistic about the value of the frontpage, and I prefer searching for things to read by browsing tags.
Thanks for the suggestion—I’ve made a note of it!