"High Value" Karma vs "Regular" (i.e. Quirrell Points)

I think "name recognition" makes a better system than Quirrell Points. It's nearly unfakeable, caries a lot of weight, and is hard to earn. Sure, it's not easily quantifiable, and it takes some time in the group to internalize it, but as recognition for outstanding accomplishments in a community it's been working fairly well for thousands of years.

A problem is that karma attempts to capture orthogonal values in a single number. Even though you can reduce those values to a single number they still need to be captured as separate values e.g. slashdot karma system for a half-assed example.

Karma seems to roughly fall into one of three buckets. The first is entertainment value e.g. a particularly witty comment that nonetheless does not add material value to the discussion. The second is informational value e.g. posting a link to particularly relevant literature of which many people are unaware. The third is argumentative value e.g. a well-reasoned and interesting perspective. All of these are captured as "karma" to some extent or another.

Objections are that this makes it difficult to filter content based on karma, which raises questions about its value. If, for example, I am primarily interested in reading hilarious witticism and interesting layman opinions, there is no way to filter out comments that contain dry references to academic literature. Alternatively, if I lack an appropriate sense of humor I might find the karma attributed to immaterial witticism inexplicable.

Even if a clever system was devised and ease of use was ignored, there are still issues of gaming and perverse incentives (e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem et al). To misappropriate an old saying, "karma is a bitch".

The SIAI could create a Flattr account:

Flattr is a micropayment system - more specifically, a microdonation system [...] Users are able to pay a small amount every month (minimum 2 euros) and then click Flattr buttons on sites to share out the money they paid in among those sites, kind of like an Internet tip jar.

If you really like a post, additionally to upvoting it one could use Flattr...

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Raemon received one Quirrell point on 16/4/2011, for his post
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/59x/high_value_karma_vs_regular/
having inspired the idea of issuing Quirrell points on Less Wrong.
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I'm not aware of any rule or norm which would put any limit on the silliness
of data that can signed or encrypted with PGP.
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    I'm not aware of any rule or norm which would put any limit on the silliness
    of data that can signed or encrypted with PGP.
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User:Raemon receive one negative Clippy point on 26/4/2011 for receiving a Quirrell point from User:Quirinus_Quirrell point on 16/4/2011. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/59x/high_value_karma_vs_regular_ie_quirrell_points/3y86>

I'm actually kinda amazed by how much I care about Karma.

I feel the same way, which seems to confirm something that occurred to me recently: the karma system is extremely important in that it determines the content, structure, and tone of posts and comments on LessWrong. It's arguably the most important factor in determining how we communicate. If you care about karma, you're going to say wildly different things that you would otherwise. How many times have you started typing a comment and then thought, "No, that'll get downvoted." How many times have you put a huge amount of effort into a comment or post to avoid downvoting? The point is, karma affects how we write and how we think, so it's definitely a topic that deserves our attention.

On another note: I'm surprised that no one (at the time of this writing) has mentioned karma's most important function: it keeps trolling to a respectable minimum. The current karma system is remarkably efficient at keeping discussions civil and intelligent--it's undoubtedly better than any other forum or blog I've seen. We should definitely keep this fact in mind when discussing potential changes.

There is sort of something like this already, no? There aren't 2 different types of Karma, but my understanding that a post (not in the discussion area) will garner 10 karma points per upvote. Assuming you are posting your more serious and valuable ideas in post form, they are 10 times more impactful on your karma than your random kinda neat comments.

Eh. Integers aren't worth very much. Insightful, engaged responses, on the other hand ...

One way to solve this problem without having to add extra features to the software would be to award fractional points of karma for slightly valuable comments e.g. the mildly amusing ones.

On the face of it, the software doesn't support fractional karma, but this is easily accomplished using randomness e.g. award 0.5 points by flipping a coin to decide whether to award a point or not.

Nooooo then I would be worthlesssssss.

Viz.

EDIT: A simple nonlinear karma that weights high karma posts more than low karma ones would seem to do exactly what you want here.

I'm sympathetic to the intent, but trying to measure the whole space of a social community with a numeric system without giving a lot of thought to exactly what you want to do sounds like an endeavor doomed to a series of unsatisfactory mechanisms with ever-increasing complexity. You can't do an ultimate karma system for measuring everything satisfactorily, at least without a karma vector around the same dimensionality as the state space of a human mind. Barring that, you need to have a clear idea of what exactly do you wish to accomplish, and how much are you willing to pay for it in increased user interface complexity, increased usage complexity (figuring out exactly what you're supposed to do with each message) and unintended consequences from people using the system in different ways as you intended.

So, I'm not really sold on things like this from a "would-be-nice" perspective, as the increased complexity would be a constant cost to the system from then on, and a whole new area of possible unintended consequences would open up.

I would like to see some experimentation on what works and what doesn't with various types of mechanical forum systems though. It's just a bit hard to do that systematically, since forums need to build communities to work, and the communities form their subculture partly around the particular mechanics of the forum.

People can always set up conventions that emerge from community culture in place of site server enforced stuff, like the PGP point thing in the comments here.

If lots of people think the comment is good, it gets lots of karma. That's fine.

There is little evidence the karma system is actually broken in any manner that requires fixing.

This is exactly how I feel, except the solution I came up with for it was different (allow people to give a massive karma boost for a karma cost to themselves. Like, I can pay 5 karma to give something 10 upvotes)

You can treat the karma as a weak signal for group conformity. The numbers do not really mean much. Maybe translating it into fuzziness would help a bit. (Will someone write a plug-in for that?)

On the other hand i find myself frighteningly attracted to the points. 50 to go for the next level-up. Might pose to be a minor problem on LW.

I do however not post or comment as karma bait. Just checking the stats too often.

But I think there is a qualitative difference between a guy who makes one amazing post that gathers 80 Karma and a guy who makes 800 posts that are kinda neat.

FTFY.

I see that you have edited the title of this post to mention Quirrell points. I appreciate the gesture. However, you've misspelled my name; it should have two 'l's.

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Raemon received one Quirrell point on 16/4/2011, for his post
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/59x/high_value_karma_vs_regular/
having inspired the idea of issuing Quirrell points on Less Wrong.
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