But I think that those who have spent a long time on the forum do tend to be better informed and I do want their votes to count for more.
You made about +448 karma from the last post. When an actual scientist like Jobst comes here and posts a very well informed post, it getās +1 karma (from me, love ya Jobst). People like Jobst have a fulltime job as a scientist and are too productive to spend most of their time online, and when they do go online they are so well informed it wonāt give them any voting power because terminally online people like us are simply not informed enough to understand him, and we have all the voting power. If you say something true but unpopular to those who already have power, you might even lose karma. There is no reason to think that those who have more voting power are more informed, more productive or more altruistic.
EDIT: To clarify: not literally his last post, his last post like this. Splitting things up into smaller vote-able chunks (like this post) nets you more voting-power than making the big posts of criticisms that inspire them. Having a high quantity is a better path to gaining voting power than high quality. This allows a few highly active (and thus most likely orthodox) users to boost or tank any piece of writing. When we combine this with the fact that low karma comments are hidden we basically allow people with high karma (most likely orthodox users) to soft-censor their own critics.
If itās a good post, canāt it convince people to upvote it? I think the question is, if on average people with high karma have a better sense of what the community is gonna value than those with low karma. Maybe I would like jobst to have more, but most people arenāt jobst.
On balance I still like that that the top forum users have the ability to do some moderation.
But Iād be open to turning it off and seeing how that affects stuff.
I think the āfulltime job as a scientistā situation could be addressed with an āapply for curationā process, as outlined in the second half of this comment.
You made about +448 karma from the last post. When an actual scientist like Jobst comes here and posts a very well informed post, it getās +1 karma (from me, love ya Jobst). People like Jobst have a fulltime job as a scientist and are too productive to spend most of their time online, and when they do go online they are so well informed it wonāt give them any voting power because terminally online people like us are simply not informed enough to understand him, and we have all the voting power. If you say something true but unpopular to those who already have power, you might even lose karma. There is no reason to think that those who have more voting power are more informed, more productive or more altruistic.
EDIT: To clarify: not literally his last post, his last post like this. Splitting things up into smaller vote-able chunks (like this post) nets you more voting-power than making the big posts of criticisms that inspire them. Having a high quantity is a better path to gaining voting power than high quality. This allows a few highly active (and thus most likely orthodox) users to boost or tank any piece of writing.
When we combine this with the fact that low karma comments are hidden we basically allow people with high karma (most likely orthodox users) to soft-censor their own critics.
If itās a good post, canāt it convince people to upvote it? I think the question is, if on average people with high karma have a better sense of what the community is gonna value than those with low karma. Maybe I would like jobst to have more, but most people arenāt jobst.
On balance I still like that that the top forum users have the ability to do some moderation.
But Iād be open to turning it off and seeing how that affects stuff.
I think the āfulltime job as a scientistā situation could be addressed with an āapply for curationā process, as outlined in the second half of this comment.