Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let’s take an old post like this. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.
Changing the raw totals sounds confusing, but you could implement some form of regularisation in ranking contexts—for example karma relative to total karma across all posts for that month.
It is a little strange that if I go to an old post I upvoted, un-upvote, and then re-upvote, its karma increases I think.
It’s not just about ranking. It’s also about how much karma individual users have and (most importantly) about how worthy-of-reading a post looks when you open it based on its karma. I think that the situation where all votes made before the new system are worth one karma point is no less confusing than a system where they are worth two karma points.
Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let’s take an old post like this. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.
Changing the raw totals sounds confusing, but you could implement some form of regularisation in ranking contexts—for example karma relative to total karma across all posts for that month.
It is a little strange that if I go to an old post I upvoted, un-upvote, and then re-upvote, its karma increases I think.
It’s not just about ranking. It’s also about how much karma individual users have and (most importantly) about how worthy-of-reading a post looks when you open it based on its karma. I think that the situation where all votes made before the new system are worth one karma point is no less confusing than a system where they are worth two karma points.
Triple sounds approximately right to me in terms of relative weighting.