If this is an issue at all, I don’t think this is an issue with karma, I think it’s an issue with mass communication in general.
You argue that this brings attention to posts in a way that does not correspond to importance. For example, you talk about it misrepresenting the quality of the forum, and leading authors to disengage from real world issues. To this I reply—who are you to decide which posts are actually more important?
There are actually very few posts on the forum dealing with real world issues—they are mostly those looking at cause areas and interventions in global health and in policy, plus maybe some biosecurity org updates. The rest, are about the community and its priorities (even those about AI for example, because they deal with how to manage work by community members, and only deal with hypothetical reality). I don’t think it can be said that among those there’s inherently more value in a post about a specific cause area than in a meta post.
If this is an issue at all, I don’t think this is an issue with karma, I think it’s an issue with mass communication in general.
You argue that this brings attention to posts in a way that does not correspond to importance. For example, you talk about it misrepresenting the quality of the forum, and leading authors to disengage from real world issues. To this I reply—who are you to decide which posts are actually more important?
There are actually very few posts on the forum dealing with real world issues—they are mostly those looking at cause areas and interventions in global health and in policy, plus maybe some biosecurity org updates. The rest, are about the community and its priorities (even those about AI for example, because they deal with how to manage work by community members, and only deal with hypothetical reality). I don’t think it can be said that among those there’s inherently more value in a post about a specific cause area than in a meta post.