I think it is better to think of Karma as tracking the number of people that read and liked a post, rather than the value of a post relative to other posts.
i.e. people are generally thinking how much do I like the post rather than given the current karma, what change should I make to push it to the correct value.
Yeah, I think you’ve encapsulated the two key ways people think about karma, and the difference between them. There was some discussion on LessWrong about this here.
I think probably the ideal would be for everyone to vote purely based on their reaction to the post and not at all in response to its current total. That’s probably not feasible – the information about the total is there and people will react to it – but I do think that complaining that a post has the wrong total karma (which is my reading of the top-level comment) is pushing the community towards total-based voting in a way I think isn’t great.
I think it is better to think of Karma as tracking the number of people that read and liked a post, rather than the value of a post relative to other posts.
i.e. people are generally thinking how much do I like the post rather than given the current karma, what change should I make to push it to the correct value.
Yeah, I think you’ve encapsulated the two key ways people think about karma, and the difference between them. There was some discussion on LessWrong about this here.
I think probably the ideal would be for everyone to vote purely based on their reaction to the post and not at all in response to its current total. That’s probably not feasible – the information about the total is there and people will react to it – but I do think that complaining that a post has the wrong total karma (which is my reading of the top-level comment) is pushing the community towards total-based voting in a way I think isn’t great.