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 didn’t expect it to get as many votes as it did, but I think people just like hearing nice things — there’s not really anything to miss.
Most of the top posts of all time have 2+ karma per vote, while this post has less. That lines up with many people reading it, most people liking it, but few people loving it.
The karma of this post is quite disproportional to its value.. It doesn’t have that much information, or am I missing something?
People like to hear nice things about themselves from prominent people, and Bryan is non-EA enough to make it feel not entirely self-congratulatory.
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 didn’t expect it to get as many votes as it did, but I think people just like hearing nice things — there’s not really anything to miss.
Most of the top posts of all time have 2+ karma per vote, while this post has less. That lines up with many people reading it, most people liking it, but few people loving it.