Good question. It is true that not-for-profits and the government have a lot in common. Most importantly, they're both supposed to work directly for the public good (rather than for their own profits). There are some important differences, though:

1) Not-for-profits do not have monopoly on violence. (Most of the below follow from that.) 2) People do not have the same sense of entitlement visavi not-for-profits 3) You normally can create more of a "community spirit" within a not-for-profit. In governmental organizations, users have more of a tendency to view the leadership as "parents" to whom one goes to request more stuff. People take more responsibility in not-for-profits, especially small ones (this is closely related to 2)). 4) We might want to have a dispersed distribution of power in society. If so, we should not give too much power to the government, but would be better off giving power to other entities, such as not-for-profits.

Not-for-profit organizations working either for the public good or for some interest group such as workers, farmers, etc, have always had lots of influence in democratic societies. Often they've taken or been assigned tasks that the government could have done, such as health care, education (e.g. in the case of churches), unemployment insurance (unions), etc. They have of course always been legally regulated, and some of them have been closely related to political parties (e.g. churches - Christian democrats, unions - social democrats). However, the distinction between non-governmental organizations and governmental organizations has, by and large, been upheld in democratic countries (though it wasn't in, e.g. Sovjet Union).

True. I think that Wikipedia should generate more revenue via ads, in order to be able to do more stuff.

Interesting. However, one would also like to know the causes of why Wikipedia's leadership started to behave in this way. One possible explanation is that they didn't have enough monetary incentives. If they would have had stronger incentives to keep the number of revisions growing they would have implemented policies that made sure that happened. I think there could be something to that - that if Google's Knobe had outcompeted Wikipedia, it wouldn't have had the same problems, because it would have been more rationally governed.

Thanks, that's very interesting. I was especially interested in this:

We can gauge each Superuser’s voting accuracy based on their performance on honeypots (proposed updates with known answers which are deliberately inserted into the updates queue). Measuring performance and using these probabilities correctly is the key to how we assign points to a Superuser’s vote.

So they measure voting accuracy based on some questions on which they know the true answer.

There is a difference between their votes and the kind of votes cast here, though; namely that on Less Wrong there is not in a strict sense a "true answer" to how good a post or comment is. So that tactics cannot be used.

On questions on which there is a true answer it is easier to track people's reliability and provide them with incentives to answer reliably. On questions which are more an issue of preference ("e.g. how good is this post?") that is harder.

Interesting, and an interesting Slashdot link. I especially like the idea of "moderating the moderators". You do need to check whether people vote seriously in some way, it seems to me.

The only problem I see is Richard's concern below that multi-criterial systems, where you actually vote on all criteria, may turn out to be too cumbersome to use.

If everyone had identical criteria for voting, we would see all postings having either large positive karma, karma near zero, or large negative karma. The more alike people are in their judgements, the less information the total score provides.

If you only can give 1 plus vote, 1 negative vote, or no vote at all, that seems to follow. If you rather could give, say 1-5 positive or negative Karma, we would see a greater variety of scores.

Also, note that many posts and especially comments have very few votes. This means that the votes actually cast will often not be typical of the whole population of possible voters in a system where people's votes vary considerably. In a system where people's votes are more alike, this obviously happens less frequently.

Yes! One click! A more complicated system would not be too complicated to use, but too complicated to be worth using. On Ebay, I'm happy to give feedback as positive/neutral/negative plus a few words of boilerplate, but I never use their 5-star scales for quality of packaging, promptness of delivery, etc. How do I rate a cardboard box out of 5?

I agree that one shouldn't have to rate, e.g. comments on say five different criteria. The system could be be somewhat more complex to comprehend, but you're right that it shouldn't be significantly more complex to use.

I think one obvious improvement is, though, to separate the posts into different categories which are to be assessed on different criteria. You could have one "objective information/literature review" section, one "opinion piece/discussion" section, one "meetup" section, and possibly a few more. In each section, you'd be rated on different criteria. That way, original pieces wouldn't be downvoted because they're not literature reviews, which seems to be Gunnar's (justifiable) complaint.

This system would be superior to the present, and no more complicated. I think further improvements are also possible, but those should be separately discussed.

The Karma system is better than nothing, and also better than even simpler systems as Facebook's like system, but the main problem is that it is too simple.

Presumably the Karma system is supposed to at least do two things:

1) Influence posters' behaviour (e.g. if you get downvoted when writing in a certain way you're likely to change)

2) Inform readers which posts and comments to read

However, it does not perform these tasks very efficiently, the reason being that it is so very unclear what we are voting on. People apply wildly different criteria. For instance, I would guess that some have a much lower threshold for throwing a downvote than others. Also, some primarily reward people who write posts containing objective information (as pointed out above), whereas others also reward other sorts of posts.

As someone pointed out somewere, there is also a bandwagon effect when it comes to voting, so that posts/comments with upvotes/downvotes are more likely to continue to be upvoted/downvoted. This means that a certain post which a lot of people would actually find interesting can get downvoted because of bad luck: the first voter uses non-standard criteria and his vote then influences subsequent voters.

All this means that both posters and readers can't know exactly why it is that a certain post has got a certain amount of Karma. As a result, the present Karma system does not fulfil either task 1) or task 2) adequately. If you don't know why a certain post got a certain amount of Karma, how can you know how to change your writing, and how can you decide whether to read it or not?

Of course, the comments give both readers and posters a better picture of what people think of the post, but saying this is a bit beside the point. If it doesn't matter that the Karma system is less than satisfactory because you can read the comments, then why have the Karma system after all?

The main advantage of the present Karma system is its simplicity. It could be argued that more complex system would be too complicated for people to comprehend, etc. That is perhaps an argument that would be viable at Reddit and similar sites, but surely a site claiming to be "rationalist" should be able to assume that it's members can handle more complex systems.

Exactly how such a system is to be devised is an important question which should be discussed (suggestions are welcome) but I'll stop here for now.