A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/+3, if they wish.
I think the issue is more that different users have very disparate norms about how often to vote, when to use a strong vote, and what to use it on. My sense (from a combination of noticing voting patterns and reading specific users’ comments about how they vote) is that most are pretty low-key about voting, but a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
In addition to scaling down the weight of strong votes as MichaelStJules suggested, another corrective we could think about is giving all users a limited allocation of strong upvotes/downvotes they can use, say, each month. That way high-karma users can still act in a kind of decentralized moderator role on the level of individual posts and comments, but it’s more difficult for one person to exert too much influence over the whole site.
This feels reasonable to me. Personally, I very rarely strong-upvote (except the default strong-upvote for my own posts), and almost never strong-downvote unless it’s clear spam. If there’s a clearer “use it or lose it” policy, I think I’d be more inclined to ration out more strong-upvotes and strong-downvotes for favorite/least favorite (in terms of usefulness) post or comment that week.
a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
It would be interesting to get peoples guesses/hypothesis of this specific behavior, then see how often it actually occurs.
Personally, my guess is that EA forum accounts with large karma don’t often do this behavior “negatively” (they rarely strong downvote and and negatively comment). When this does happen, I expect to find this to be positive and reasonable.
In case anyone is interested, my activity referred to above, begun almost half a year ago, provides data to identify instances of the behavior mentioned by IanDavidMoss, and other potentially interesting temporal patterns of voting and commenting. There are several other interesting things that can examined too.
I would be willing to share this data, as well as provide various kinds of technical assistance to people working on any principled technical project[1] related to the forum or relevant data.
A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/+3, if they wish.
I think the issue is more that different users have very disparate norms about how often to vote, when to use a strong vote, and what to use it on. My sense (from a combination of noticing voting patterns and reading specific users’ comments about how they vote) is that most are pretty low-key about voting, but a few high-karma users are much more intense about it and don’t hesitate to throw their weight around. These users can then have a wildly disproportionate effect on discourse because if their vote is worth, say, 7 points, their opinion on one piece of content vs. another can be and often is worth a full 14 points.
In addition to scaling down the weight of strong votes as MichaelStJules suggested, another corrective we could think about is giving all users a limited allocation of strong upvotes/downvotes they can use, say, each month. That way high-karma users can still act in a kind of decentralized moderator role on the level of individual posts and comments, but it’s more difficult for one person to exert too much influence over the whole site.
This feels reasonable to me. Personally, I very rarely strong-upvote (except the default strong-upvote for my own posts), and almost never strong-downvote unless it’s clear spam. If there’s a clearer “use it or lose it” policy, I think I’d be more inclined to ration out more strong-upvotes and strong-downvotes for favorite/least favorite (in terms of usefulness) post or comment that week.
It would be interesting to get peoples guesses/hypothesis of this specific behavior, then see how often it actually occurs.
Personally, my guess is that EA forum accounts with large karma don’t often do this behavior “negatively” (they rarely strong downvote and and negatively comment). When this does happen, I expect to find this to be positive and reasonable.
In case anyone is interested, my activity referred to above, begun almost half a year ago, provides data to identify instances of the behavior mentioned by IanDavidMoss, and other potentially interesting temporal patterns of voting and commenting. There are several other interesting things that can examined too.
I would be willing to share this data, as well as provide various kinds of technical assistance to people working on any principled technical project[1] related to the forum or relevant data.
I do not currently expect to personally work on an EA associated project related to the forum or accept EA funding to do so.