Vote brigading is bad because it ‘turns karma into a popularity contest’ as you rightly point out. However, the Effective Altruism Forum currently allows users with more karma to cast more votes on any post or comment. How is this not just as much, if not more, a popularity contest? After all, you are letting some users have more votes, simply because they are popular users (they have more karma).
Brigading involves an expression of popularity that is inauthentic for karma purposes—its success depends on how many friends/bots/others you have in the outside world. The karma system is designed to measure authentic community sentiment based on interaction with the material, and the designers basically felt that the opinions of community-trusted and experienced contributors on what was karmaworthy content was more probative than votes from the average user. While I think the system needs some reform, giving more weight to high karma users doesn’t promote inauthentic engagement in the way brigading does.
It is true that vote brigading may be worse than the forum’s unequal karma system, because, as you point out, at least popularity on this forum is more likely to be related to have more justified opinions on posts and comments on this forum.
However, unequal voting still falsely equates popularity—specifically, popularity on this forum—with expertise. There are several reasons why this is problematic. First, it excludes expertise from outside of the effective altruism movement: people with truly valuable perspectives and relevant expertise who are not affiliated with effective altruism have less voting power and may be less likely to get upvoted by the more popular users, who may fail to appreciate valuable new perspectives they are not used to. Second, it overgeneralizes expertise: for example, someone who might have earned a lot of karma by writing on x-risks can now also cast more votes on posts completely unrelated to that (such as posts on global health and animal advocacy), which makes no sense. Third, it privileges the most active commenters: since karma from votes on posts and karma from votes on comments both count towards the same overall karma score, someone who has written a small number of excellent, well-researched posts may have far less karma (and thus far less voting power) than someone who has written dozens of mediocre (but not bad) comments, especially if these comments are under recent or popular posts (where comments are most likely to be upvoted). Fourth, it privileges individuals who were already quite influential in the effective altruism movement when they created their forum account: they will find it far, far easier to collect karma than those who are both new and unknown in the effective altruism movement. Perhaps all these problems explain why almost no website ever uses the same unequal voting system found on this forum.
And even if is true that users with more karma deserve to have more voting power, then the current voting system is still unreasonably disproportional. The difference in voting power between less and more popular users should at the very least be considerably reduced. Maybe it is acceptable to have something where users who have 1,000 or more karma should have a strong upvote of 3 and a regular upvote of 1, and not, as it is currently the case, overall voting power that is about twice as strong as that of users with less than 250 karma. You said you think the karma system should be reformed, so I hope you are in favor of changes like these.
I think few people would argue that there is a super-strong correlation between voting power and assessment of content value. However, I’m also skeptical that the correlation is zero or trivially different from zero. So the question is how much does one weigh the value added by that correlation vs. the downsides of weighing votes by karma? In the abstract, I can potentially live with your downsides:
It doesn’t bother me that a forum sponsored by an effective-altruism group gives more voting power to people who are (much more likely to be) effective altruists. I like a universe where different interest communities can curate content that meets their needs, even though I recognize the downsides. I just don’t think there is a lack of spaces where general-population weights apply, so I assign fairly modest value to creating another one.
Although weighting subject-specific karma would be ideal, I still suspect that the average 5000 karma user who posts and knows mainly about GH&D still has some advantage in identifying quality x-risk content over the average 100 karma user. (Of course, if the 5000 karma user actually doesn’t understand the x-risk content well enough, we can hope that the user had been around enough to have awareness of their own knowledge limitations and not vote—or at least not strongvote! -- on content they do not sufficiently understand. But we can’t assume that.)
The imbalance in how karma is awarded is a significant problem (see below). But it’s not implausible that, on average, people who have spent a lot of time reading and writing would be better at identifying quality content than the median user.
I’m psuedonymous and not even in an EA or EA-adjacent job, so my experience doesn’t track your point about influence in EA = ease of collecting karma. But that is a sample of one, and other people’s mileage may vary.
One has to balance those against the downsides of mostly-egalitarian approaches or some centralized authority deciding who should get more voting power.
On the positive side, I’d say that the Forum works as a fairly low-moderation space because—by voting weight at least—the user base is pretty good at informal regulation by voting down uncivil, self-promotional, needlessly inflammatory, or other problematic content. Maybe that would work just as well with egalitarian voting strength, though? I like moderate decentralization in general, so I would be open to (e.g.,) giving some psuedo-moderation abilities to some high-karma users who also passed a community vote.
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My highest reform priority might be to allow users to select from different karma weightings for how posts and comments are displayed to them (e.g., traditional karma weights, egalitarian weights, and at least one point in between). Or that could be a lower priority if it required more developer time than I am hoping! Ultimately the proof is in the pudding—if a certain weighing is best at pushing good content to the top, users should slowly gravitate toward it and we will learn the correct weights (for most users) by experimentation rather than guessing at how to balance competing considerations.
Second priority would be rebalancing karma to better match useful contribution; the karma awarded per unit of value created seems higher for meta content than object-level content, and is probably higher for comments than main posts as you point out.
Third priority would be reining in strongvotes, which I think indirectly addresses some of what you’re identifying. The extent to which a user is willing to deploy strongvotes is probably a more significant determinant of voting power than the user’s base karma, and it’s not clear that everyone is using anywhere near the same bar for strongvoting. Most likely, the best reform would adjust the strength of a user’s strongvote in some way based on its frequency of deployment (although strongvoting down norm-breaking content should not be disincentivized!).
I agree with most of what you wrote here, thank you for taking the time to reply. I agree that an option to display a comment or post’s karma score based on different scoring systems (the old system, an egaliterian one, …) would already be a great improvement.
The only point that I find questionable is the idea that it’s OK that a forum ran by effective altruists gives more voting power to effective altruists. To me, this seems at odds with the ideals of cause neutrality and means neutrality: how can effective altruists claim that any means of doing good is in principle open to their consideration, when their most important online discussion forum gives some users, compared to others, so much more ability to downvote or upvote (new) ideas, questions and proposals?
I think it’s important to start by figuring out why the Forum has value. It’s a very unusual institution. Thinking about organizations/movements/etc. that are similar to EA, I’m not coming up with any clear analogues (although my knowledge of similar things is hardly encylopedic). It’s unusually open for a central epistemic institution. You can be a random person not involved in EA, get an account, and potentially have meaningful influence on the direction of how EA thinks about the topics you choose to write on. Although some users have more voting power, I think there is at most a fairly modest correlation between voting power and other power in EA. The net effect is deconcentration of epistemic power within EA, which I appreciate. I think your concern is a fair one, which I’d characterize as in part asking whether the Forum could further deconcentrate epistemic power by changing the karma system.
Most Internet message boards add little to no real value to the world—why is this one different? To me, it’s critical to (roughly) figure out how the Forum adds value to the world before making any major changes to it. The most obvious theory of value-add is many Forum readers are in a position to use the information and perspective they gain from reading and participating to do significant good in the world. I’d suggest that the bulk of those readers are effective altruists working in EA-related positions, so the Forum’s theory of value significantly depends on those readers finding the Forum a good source of actionable information for time invested.
It’s less clear how content that those users do not find helpful ultimately leads to real-world value, and having a good signal:noise ratio (in those readers’ eyes) is important to keeping them engaged. If they don’t find participation an effective use of time, conversations that would be happening on the public Forum are likely to migrate to Slack and similar spaces. And the bulk of high-karma users are EAs in EA-related position (myself being one of the exceptions), so one would think there’s a fairly good correlation between voting power and ability to act on the information obtained from the Forum.
Looking at other message boards, the ones with light-touch moderation and egalitarian voting tend to have a bad signal:noise ratio (e.g., most of Reddit). If you think about subreddits with top-quality material and a good signal:noise ratio (e.g., r/AskHistorians), they tend to be aggressively moderated. I am worried that moving too much in a most-of-Reddit direction would destroy much of the Forum’s value proposition. Ironically, I think this would increase the centralizing influences on EA thought. And of course, having more active moderation increases the influence of the appointing authorities (who would be people who already have a lot of influence in EA).
So I think we actually share some of the same values and concerns here—I am just more concerned that reducing EA influence on Forum voting too much would impair the Forum’s value and have a net negative effect on getting new ideas, questions, and proposals out there.
I guess another crux is that I don’t see the differences in voting power as “so much more” ability. On regular votes—which I believe are the vast majority of votes cast—no user has more than twice the voting power of someone who just signed up. On strongvotes, where the differences are more pronounced, one of the most powerful voters [5-10K karma] counts for eight, while someone who has posted a few dozen comments and maybe a top level post probably counts for four [250-499 karma], and someone who is almost brand new counts for two [10-99 karma]. I can’t get the top karma chart to work, but I think there are only a few dozen users with 5K+ (there are now a few with 10K+). Since there are a lot more lower/medium karma users, the total fraction of the total voting power in the hands of the high-karma crowd is not particularly high.
I agree that the voting system is unreasonably disproportionate. I think I got infinite +5 strong votes around 500 karma or so, which strikes me as absurd. And apparently people vote brigade enough for the mod team to ask people not to do so, so it’s not like this feature isn’t abused at least sometimes.
Vote brigading is bad because it ‘turns karma into a popularity contest’ as you rightly point out. However, the Effective Altruism Forum currently allows users with more karma to cast more votes on any post or comment. How is this not just as much, if not more, a popularity contest? After all, you are letting some users have more votes, simply because they are popular users (they have more karma).
Brigading involves an expression of popularity that is inauthentic for karma purposes—its success depends on how many friends/bots/others you have in the outside world. The karma system is designed to measure authentic community sentiment based on interaction with the material, and the designers basically felt that the opinions of community-trusted and experienced contributors on what was karmaworthy content was more probative than votes from the average user. While I think the system needs some reform, giving more weight to high karma users doesn’t promote inauthentic engagement in the way brigading does.
Edit: duplicated word
It is true that vote brigading may be worse than the forum’s unequal karma system, because, as you point out, at least popularity on this forum is more likely to be related to have more justified opinions on posts and comments on this forum.
However, unequal voting still falsely equates popularity—specifically, popularity on this forum—with expertise. There are several reasons why this is problematic. First, it excludes expertise from outside of the effective altruism movement: people with truly valuable perspectives and relevant expertise who are not affiliated with effective altruism have less voting power and may be less likely to get upvoted by the more popular users, who may fail to appreciate valuable new perspectives they are not used to. Second, it overgeneralizes expertise: for example, someone who might have earned a lot of karma by writing on x-risks can now also cast more votes on posts completely unrelated to that (such as posts on global health and animal advocacy), which makes no sense. Third, it privileges the most active commenters: since karma from votes on posts and karma from votes on comments both count towards the same overall karma score, someone who has written a small number of excellent, well-researched posts may have far less karma (and thus far less voting power) than someone who has written dozens of mediocre (but not bad) comments, especially if these comments are under recent or popular posts (where comments are most likely to be upvoted). Fourth, it privileges individuals who were already quite influential in the effective altruism movement when they created their forum account: they will find it far, far easier to collect karma than those who are both new and unknown in the effective altruism movement. Perhaps all these problems explain why almost no website ever uses the same unequal voting system found on this forum.
And even if is true that users with more karma deserve to have more voting power, then the current voting system is still unreasonably disproportional. The difference in voting power between less and more popular users should at the very least be considerably reduced. Maybe it is acceptable to have something where users who have 1,000 or more karma should have a strong upvote of 3 and a regular upvote of 1, and not, as it is currently the case, overall voting power that is about twice as strong as that of users with less than 250 karma. You said you think the karma system should be reformed, so I hope you are in favor of changes like these.
I think few people would argue that there is a super-strong correlation between voting power and assessment of content value. However, I’m also skeptical that the correlation is zero or trivially different from zero. So the question is how much does one weigh the value added by that correlation vs. the downsides of weighing votes by karma? In the abstract, I can potentially live with your downsides:
It doesn’t bother me that a forum sponsored by an effective-altruism group gives more voting power to people who are (much more likely to be) effective altruists. I like a universe where different interest communities can curate content that meets their needs, even though I recognize the downsides. I just don’t think there is a lack of spaces where general-population weights apply, so I assign fairly modest value to creating another one.
Although weighting subject-specific karma would be ideal, I still suspect that the average 5000 karma user who posts and knows mainly about GH&D still has some advantage in identifying quality x-risk content over the average 100 karma user. (Of course, if the 5000 karma user actually doesn’t understand the x-risk content well enough, we can hope that the user had been around enough to have awareness of their own knowledge limitations and not vote—or at least not strongvote! -- on content they do not sufficiently understand. But we can’t assume that.)
The imbalance in how karma is awarded is a significant problem (see below). But it’s not implausible that, on average, people who have spent a lot of time reading and writing would be better at identifying quality content than the median user.
I’m psuedonymous and not even in an EA or EA-adjacent job, so my experience doesn’t track your point about influence in EA = ease of collecting karma. But that is a sample of one, and other people’s mileage may vary.
One has to balance those against the downsides of mostly-egalitarian approaches or some centralized authority deciding who should get more voting power.
On the positive side, I’d say that the Forum works as a fairly low-moderation space because—by voting weight at least—the user base is pretty good at informal regulation by voting down uncivil, self-promotional, needlessly inflammatory, or other problematic content. Maybe that would work just as well with egalitarian voting strength, though? I like moderate decentralization in general, so I would be open to (e.g.,) giving some psuedo-moderation abilities to some high-karma users who also passed a community vote.
--
My highest reform priority might be to allow users to select from different karma weightings for how posts and comments are displayed to them (e.g., traditional karma weights, egalitarian weights, and at least one point in between). Or that could be a lower priority if it required more developer time than I am hoping! Ultimately the proof is in the pudding—if a certain weighing is best at pushing good content to the top, users should slowly gravitate toward it and we will learn the correct weights (for most users) by experimentation rather than guessing at how to balance competing considerations.
Second priority would be rebalancing karma to better match useful contribution; the karma awarded per unit of value created seems higher for meta content than object-level content, and is probably higher for comments than main posts as you point out.
Third priority would be reining in strongvotes, which I think indirectly addresses some of what you’re identifying. The extent to which a user is willing to deploy strongvotes is probably a more significant determinant of voting power than the user’s base karma, and it’s not clear that everyone is using anywhere near the same bar for strongvoting. Most likely, the best reform would adjust the strength of a user’s strongvote in some way based on its frequency of deployment (although strongvoting down norm-breaking content should not be disincentivized!).
I agree with most of what you wrote here, thank you for taking the time to reply. I agree that an option to display a comment or post’s karma score based on different scoring systems (the old system, an egaliterian one, …) would already be a great improvement.
The only point that I find questionable is the idea that it’s OK that a forum ran by effective altruists gives more voting power to effective altruists. To me, this seems at odds with the ideals of cause neutrality and means neutrality: how can effective altruists claim that any means of doing good is in principle open to their consideration, when their most important online discussion forum gives some users, compared to others, so much more ability to downvote or upvote (new) ideas, questions and proposals?
I think it’s important to start by figuring out why the Forum has value. It’s a very unusual institution. Thinking about organizations/movements/etc. that are similar to EA, I’m not coming up with any clear analogues (although my knowledge of similar things is hardly encylopedic). It’s unusually open for a central epistemic institution. You can be a random person not involved in EA, get an account, and potentially have meaningful influence on the direction of how EA thinks about the topics you choose to write on. Although some users have more voting power, I think there is at most a fairly modest correlation between voting power and other power in EA. The net effect is deconcentration of epistemic power within EA, which I appreciate. I think your concern is a fair one, which I’d characterize as in part asking whether the Forum could further deconcentrate epistemic power by changing the karma system.
Most Internet message boards add little to no real value to the world—why is this one different? To me, it’s critical to (roughly) figure out how the Forum adds value to the world before making any major changes to it. The most obvious theory of value-add is many Forum readers are in a position to use the information and perspective they gain from reading and participating to do significant good in the world. I’d suggest that the bulk of those readers are effective altruists working in EA-related positions, so the Forum’s theory of value significantly depends on those readers finding the Forum a good source of actionable information for time invested.
It’s less clear how content that those users do not find helpful ultimately leads to real-world value, and having a good signal:noise ratio (in those readers’ eyes) is important to keeping them engaged. If they don’t find participation an effective use of time, conversations that would be happening on the public Forum are likely to migrate to Slack and similar spaces. And the bulk of high-karma users are EAs in EA-related position (myself being one of the exceptions), so one would think there’s a fairly good correlation between voting power and ability to act on the information obtained from the Forum.
Looking at other message boards, the ones with light-touch moderation and egalitarian voting tend to have a bad signal:noise ratio (e.g., most of Reddit). If you think about subreddits with top-quality material and a good signal:noise ratio (e.g., r/AskHistorians), they tend to be aggressively moderated. I am worried that moving too much in a most-of-Reddit direction would destroy much of the Forum’s value proposition. Ironically, I think this would increase the centralizing influences on EA thought. And of course, having more active moderation increases the influence of the appointing authorities (who would be people who already have a lot of influence in EA).
So I think we actually share some of the same values and concerns here—I am just more concerned that reducing EA influence on Forum voting too much would impair the Forum’s value and have a net negative effect on getting new ideas, questions, and proposals out there.
I guess another crux is that I don’t see the differences in voting power as “so much more” ability. On regular votes—which I believe are the vast majority of votes cast—no user has more than twice the voting power of someone who just signed up. On strongvotes, where the differences are more pronounced, one of the most powerful voters [5-10K karma] counts for eight, while someone who has posted a few dozen comments and maybe a top level post probably counts for four [250-499 karma], and someone who is almost brand new counts for two [10-99 karma]. I can’t get the top karma chart to work, but I think there are only a few dozen users with 5K+ (there are now a few with 10K+). Since there are a lot more lower/medium karma users, the total fraction of the total voting power in the hands of the high-karma crowd is not particularly high.
I agree that the voting system is unreasonably disproportionate. I think I got infinite +5 strong votes around 500 karma or so, which strikes me as absurd. And apparently people vote brigade enough for the mod team to ask people not to do so, so it’s not like this feature isn’t abused at least sometimes.