As someone whose spent time going through the forum both new and old, I find it frustrating to see posts that have lost their value (mostly job postings that are now closed) cluttering up the space from the quality posts I’m trying to read. Generally I think these should be removed, and this has lead me to another question: if your post doesn’t fair well in the Game of Karmas, should you delete it?
I posted this a little bit ago, a linkpost mentioning an AI framework that looked interesting along with some questions I had. It currently has 52 views by unique devices, 3 karma (no votes besides my own) and no comments. I take this to be a fairly straightforwardly useless post, and was debating on taking it down, when I got to thinking, what’s a good threshold for this? Lizka and others have spoken towards trying to set a lower bar for what’s posted, and not feeling like you have to have a super thought out and well produced product before you post, which I like and support. But there has to be some point at which the content is just bad or not relevant, and it seems like once you’ve recognized that your post is that, you should probably take it down.
I think this consideration would maybe be non-necessary if we used karma differently. Right now I take a karma downvote to be a rarer thing that roughly means “this comment/post is content I don’t think is helpful for others to see, or is actively bad” (relative to other comments/posts or just on its own). If we instead voted more frequently and viewed karma as saying “this comment/post wasn’t helpful for me to read” then it would be as simple as setting a bar at 0 and determining that any post that equalized above the line is probably worthwhile, while anything negative is probably not. But because the community doesn’t seem to use karma that way, I’m left wondering what a good metric for this might be.
Roughly, I think my proposal would be that if your post has 30 views from unique devices, and is < 5 karma, it’s probably below bar and worth deleting. I’d love feedback on this general principle, and would welcome answers that set other specific bars or just give one’s general thoughts on when to delete a post or not.
In what sense do you think they are causing clutter? Naively I would have thought a very low karma post would basically not be seen by people at all unless they were actively searching for it, in which case it is good for it to be available.
For the post you mention, I struggle to think of a realistic circumstance in which I’d be annoyed to see the title, and could imagine some where I’d be pleased—e.g. if I had read it and now wanted to find the link again. So I would vote to not delete!
Thanks for the reply :) & sorry for the delay, computer crashed and lost text, buttt
A specific project has highlighted this to me recently, where I’m trying to collate all the career advice forum posts there are, and I found that when I went through the career choice tag, there was a ton of material not really helpful towards this end. This was mainly three things (listed in terms of rough prevalence):
Old posts that could be taken down now that the event they speak of has finished (the job adds)
Improperly tagged posts (i.e. Case for emergency response teams is tagged “Career choice” but this doesn’t really make sense for anyone trying to understand how to make a career choice themselves)
Posts that just didn’t really seem additive (nothing quick to pull out here, so you’ll have to just take my word there were some of these.
Beyond this project, for me, as someone who wants to consume all the EA Forum knowledge on career choice and how to navigate it, these things have made it hard, and deleting 1 & 2 would save me a lot of time and I think streamline the process for others who might want to explore the same way. I’m not entirely sure how prevalent this is, but I think the general logic of the tag system implies something like this, so I’d be surprised if this (scrolling through a tag based on interest) didn’t happen a fair bit.
I suppose I took my post to be a 3, but I appreciate the feedback and will probably leave it up with the slightly above bar karma change now.