Voting based on current karma is a good thing.

Without that, a post that is unanimously barely worth upvoting will get an absurd amount of upvotes while another post which is recognized as earth shatteringly important by 50% will fail to stand out. Voting based on current karma gives you a measure of the *magnitude* of people's like for a comment as well as the direction, and you don't want to throw that information out.

If everyone votes based on what they think the total karma should be, then a post's karma reflects [a weighted average of opinions on what the post's total karma should be] rather than [a weighted average of opinions on the post].

This isn't true.

If people vote based on what the karma should be, the final value you get is the median of what people think the karma should be -- i.e. a median of people's opinion of the post. If you force people to ignore the current karma, you don't actually get a weighted average of opinions on the post because there's very little flexibility in how strongly you upvote a post. In order to get that magnitude signal back, you'd have to dilute your voting with dither, and while that will no doubt happen to some extent (people might be too lazy to upvote slightly-good posts, but will make sure to upvote great ones), you will get an overestimate of the value of slightly-good posts.

This is bad, because the great posts hold a disproportionate share of the value, and we very much want them to rise to the top and stand out above the rest.

This seems like an actively harmful norm, and should be stopped. If the existing karma total influences your vote strength at all, then the same post could end up with different final karma depending on the order people read/rate it. I think that is actively harmful to the goals of the karma system.

I think this way of voting is completely fucked up.

upvote = I liked it

downvote = I disliked it

spitevote = I don't really like/dislike it, I just resent that others dislike/like it

If you like it then fucking upvote it, and if you don't like it then fucking downvote it, but don't do this "I am gonna let you vote first, and then whatever you choose, I will do the exact opposite so that your vote gets cancelled". You are just adding noise, and if many people do this, then the outcomes will depend on the order people voted -- an article that divides the audience 50:50 may end up upvoted or downvoted depending on whether the vote order was "downvoters, then spitevoters, then upvoters" or "upvoters, then spitevoters, then downvoters".

EDIT:

I agree that the current system has the problem that essentially karma = appeal × visibility, so that a "slightly better than meh" content with lots of visibility can score lots of total karma. So maybe there should be a third way to vote, some kind of "mehvote" that would give +0 karma but also somehow drag the total karma towards zero, so that a comment with 5 upvotes and 5 mehvotes would result in less than 5 karma, but if it later gets additional 3 downvotes, it would still remain positive. Not sure about the exact formula, but the idea is that the result is positive if upvotes outweigh the downvotes, negative if it's the other way round, exactly U-D if there are no mehvotes, and adding the mehvotes brings the result asymptotically closer to zero.

Feedback should be genuine, and not include strategic thinking about other people's feedback. You can't have the wisdom of crowd if too many people are concerned with what other people think. Maybe adding the third vote option is necessary, I am not sure. As a side effect, it would help distinguish between "I haven't voted on this yet" and "my vote is: meh".

It is important that everyone use a similar condition for voting.

Inasmuch as voting has a defined meaning understood by the community ("I want to see more/less of this"), using it to mean something else is a Simulacrum level 2 action which starts to distort the shared map.

If we want to change the meaning of karma to be self-referential then I guess that might work but it would require this being agreed by the community as the new meaning. Doing so unilaterally on an individual basis increases the effectiveness of one's own opinion at the expense of others' opinions.

I think it's a mistake to focus very much on karma scores. My voting is not consistent - sometimes I vote based on like/dislike the topic, sometimes I vote for well-argued/confusing presentation, etc. Other than "don't want this on LW", I tend to leave a comment about downvotes, but rarely do for up-votes, and almost never for not-voting.

I tend to at least glance at most new posts every morning as I wake up and get my head moving before work, so I often vote before there is much accumulated karma on the post. I do sometimes later remove the vote, or even downvote, if it has accumulated much more than I think it should.

I answered "non-negligible consideration", but it's worth mentioning that I follow a pattern: I tend to vote based on my simple reaction if the current score is between 1 and 25-ish. And I tend to vote more strategically ("what signal do I want the total score to send") below 1 and above 25.

I rarely vote on anything since I mainly lurk without contributing anything.

If I did start voting more often, then my strategy would take into account desired karma target, but I would use current karma as evidence of a post's value to the community (which I also value in addition to the post's direct value to myself).

A way to mitigate the vote-order effect at the mechanism level would be to have users vote by specifying a desired karma target and then have the system vote strategically on their behalf (changing the vote later if necessary as new votes are cast).

When I bother to vote, I do take TK into account when upvoting. Karma serves a signalling purpose. But only when abs(TK) is large. If I see a post with +50 karma, I would have quite high expectations of it. If it exceeds that expectation, and I remember voting is a thing, I will upvote it. Since I almost never downvote, I can't say how much TK affects that.

copying my comment from https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PX7AdEkpuChKqrNoj/what-are-your-greatest-one-shot-life-improvements?commentId=t3HfbDYpr8h2NHqBD

Note that this is in reference to voting on question answers.

> Downvoting in general confuses me, but I think that downvoting to 0 is appropriate if the answer isn't quite answering the question, but downvoting past zero doesn't make sense. Downvoting to 0 feels like saying "this isn't that helpful" whereas downvoting past 0 feels like "this is actively harmful".