I’ll try to engage with the other things that you said, but I just want to clarify a specific claim first. You write:
I guess a question underlying all of this is ‘what is karma for?’ An implication of this post seems to be that karma should reflect quality, or how serious people think the issues are, all things considered.
I actually do not believe this. I think the primary/key point of karma is ordering the Frontpage & providing a signal of what to read (and ordering other pages, like when you’re exploring posts on a given topic). We don’t need to use only karma for ordering the Frontpage — and I really wish that more people used topic filters to customize their Frontpages, etc. — but I do think that’s a really important function of karma. This means that karma needs to reflect usefulness-of-reading-something to a certain extent. This post is about correcting one type of issue that arises given this use.
Note that we also correct in other ways. The Frontpage isn’t just a list of posts from all time sorted by (inflation-adjusted) karma, largely because people find it useful to read newer content (although not always), we have topic tags, etc.
So I don’t directly care about whether a post that’s 1000x more net useful than another post has 1000x (or even simply more) karma; I just want people to see the posts that will be most useful for them to engage with. (I think some people care quite a bit about karma correlating strongly with the impact of posts, and don’t think this is unreasonable as a desire, but I personally don’t think it’s that important. I do think there are other purposes to karma, like being a feedback mechanism to the authors, a sign of appreciation, etc.)
[Writing just for myself, not my employer or even my team. I am working on the Forum, and that’s probably hard to separate from my views on this topic— but this is a quickly-written comment, not something that I feedback on from the rest of the team, etc.]
Thanks for this comment, Amber!
I’ll try to engage with the other things that you said, but I just want to clarify a specific claim first. You write:
I actually do not believe this. I think the primary/key point of karma is ordering the Frontpage & providing a signal of what to read (and ordering other pages, like when you’re exploring posts on a given topic). We don’t need to use only karma for ordering the Frontpage — and I really wish that more people used topic filters to customize their Frontpages, etc. — but I do think that’s a really important function of karma. This means that karma needs to reflect usefulness-of-reading-something to a certain extent. This post is about correcting one type of issue that arises given this use.
Note that we also correct in other ways. The Frontpage isn’t just a list of posts from all time sorted by (inflation-adjusted) karma, largely because people find it useful to read newer content (although not always), we have topic tags, etc.
So I don’t directly care about whether a post that’s 1000x more net useful than another post has 1000x (or even simply more) karma; I just want people to see the posts that will be most useful for them to engage with. (I think some people care quite a bit about karma correlating strongly with the impact of posts, and don’t think this is unreasonable as a desire, but I personally don’t think it’s that important. I do think there are other purposes to karma, like being a feedback mechanism to the authors, a sign of appreciation, etc.)
[Writing just for myself, not my employer or even my team. I am working on the Forum, and that’s probably hard to separate from my views on this topic— but this is a quickly-written comment, not something that I feedback on from the rest of the team, etc.]