Voting etiquette

Positivist's guide to voting

• Q: What is karma for?

• A: You need 20 karma to write articles. That's it.

• Q: What should I upvote?

• A: That which you want to see at the top of the page.

• Q: What should I downvote?

• A: That which you don't want to see at the top of the page.

Anything else is meaningless.

Being more interested in voting as community feedback and less interested in getting the karmic high score, I've taken to removing the auto-upvote on any of my own comments that I would not have upvoted had someone else posted them, then continued to monitor the vote scores for the next few days. I've come to a couple conclusions:

• Most people seem to be voting based on what they think the final score should be, not their personal approval independent of existing score. Most posts ended up at 1 or 2, independent of the default self-upvote.
• Given roughly similar information density, people are more likely to upvote short comments.
• People are far too likely to upvote bad jokes. For a while I think my highest-scored comment was an "Eliezer Yudkowsky Fact". Oy vey.

Current proposal @ http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=144 calls for switching to a zero-based system with no self-upvotes or downvotes, and showing ratios of upvotes to downvotes (so making comments in old threads, that won't be much upvoted or downvoted, won't count against your "average" quality).

I'm beginning to think we may also want to go ahead and switch to that brilliant suggestion for distinguishing the quality upvote/downvote, and the agreement upvote/downvote.

However, all this requires programming work and isn't the top priority right now. An experienced Python programmer willing to volunteer a noticeable block of time would probably get around to it a lot sooner.

Also in re: karma— is anyone currently worried about sockpuppet upvotes? I suppose that only the 20-point threshold means enough for that to be worth it at the moment, and we haven't yet had to deal with serious trolling. But someone should be on the watch for certain kinds of misbehavior.

We could also run some simple statistics. For instance, what is the average score of one's posts and comments overall, as a simple metric of one's quality of posting, versus sheer quantity (or at least how well those posts are received on average).

But I'm really more interested in knowing why people up or downvote posts, I'm here to learn stuff too, and sometimes it may not be obvious why a post was up or downvoted, be it mine or someone's else. Even though the voting score represents the community consensus, something is amiss. In some cases, one of us may simply lack a necessary insight as to one topic in particular, to understand what that consensus judges to be obvious and straightforward in that case. If our goal is to learn and teach, then it's our duty to make it as easy and accessible for everyone to grasp those insights, and understand the reasoning behind the consensus.

Right now we don't have the programming resources to do this. Tricycle is currently working on other parts of the system. Python volunteer anyone?

A suggestion on voting:

Get rid of down votes. Only allow up-votes, and suggest the ground for upvoting would be that the voter believes the comment or post should be higher up the sort, even if the voter disagrees with it. This would be a simple rule, easy to apply, easy to understand. The fact that a comment had only one point would indicate that only its author thought it interesting or worthwhile.

Comments made late to older posts would have a lower value simply because fewer people had read them. This is a flaw in this proposal. However all sets of rules will have flaws, and the more complex the rules, or the voting system, the more likely it is that people will break the rules or fail to apply them correctly.

Note that my first five words indicate what the comment is about, so may attract attention when it is on the "recent comments" sidebar.

The moderators would need to alter the karma rule for making a post: perhaps karma of 100 or 200.

Edit: I notice for the first time from this comment that merely commenting does not give me a point, and that I may no longer up vote or down vote my own comment.

How did I miss this post entirely? Somehow I've managed to write a similar post after this one without referring to it, after scouring the site for any references to these sorts of issues.

I thought the karma system was inherited from Reddit. It might be a lot of work to change it.

How about starting by someone finding out how the current karma system works? Even Reddit has no documentation on it; they just say it's constantly changing.

OTOH, we get some security through obscurity by not knowing how it works. Hopefully no one has analyzed their karmic rise and fall to reverse-engineer the karma rules in order to exploit them.

(I am aware that hope is not a secure safeguard.)

I'm not convinced that karma is working so well; what's rewarded by the system is prolific posting at least as much as high-quality posting. Doing away with the auto-self-upvote (and making it impossible to upvote one's own comments) seems likely to be an improvement. Or maybe making each comment count for (say) 1/4 as much as an upvote.

Ditto on this. I also suggest that only post points should count for "Top Contributors"; time spent in the comments is certainly worthy, but it seems to be much cheaper to get points that way.