I think this is a false choice, because I don’t think the top karma posts are usually mediocre.
“Mediocre” was too strong—I should’ve written “high quality” in scenario A versus “excellent quality” in scenario B.
I think high karma is a good proxy for high quality, but low karma isn’t a good proxy for poor quality, because some low karma posts are (as OP said) good, but too technical or niche for general readership, or perhaps just not many people have seen it. In other words, I think there are lots of false negatives with karma but few false positives (is that metaphor at all clarifying, lol).
I mostly agree, but I think there’s some tendency for some of the best, most front-page-worthy posts to get stuck at “quite a lot of karma, but not the most” due to some combination of being (necessarily) long, specialized, technical, rigorous, difficult and/or dealing with a non-topical subject matter.
I do think it’s a shame if good non-community-drama posts never even get seen; on going onto the Forum, I’d love to see a front page featuring articles on a range of topics.
“Mediocre” was too strong—I should’ve written “high quality” in scenario A versus “excellent quality” in scenario B.
I mostly agree, but I think there’s some tendency for some of the best, most front-page-worthy posts to get stuck at “quite a lot of karma, but not the most” due to some combination of being (necessarily) long, specialized, technical, rigorous, difficult and/or dealing with a non-topical subject matter.
I agree!