Apparently people really like groupthink, it increases engagement.
Suppose you‘d want to determine who among a group of entrants in a beauty is the most beautiful according to standards shared by the group. Such determinations are hard to make, as every judge would usually vote according to their private norms of beauty, not the groups. One way to overcome this, would be to give a price to the two judges who are closest to the final result. In this setup, you‘d be incentivized to vote according to the norms you believe to be the overall group norm, not your individual norm. The result would be „the groups belief about what the group sees as beautiful“.
Social media such reddit and Facebook incorporates this concepts on two levels:
- At the user level, users aiming to gather likes/karma/... are incentivized to submit content they believe the group finds most useful. Of course this is why we instate voting systems in the first place, so that great content (according to the communities standard for such) is submitted. On the other hand, this incentive scheme drives unpopular opinions to the margins. Hence, fringe content is more likely to be found on sites without a like system such as image boards. There, a different incentive exists: survival of your post directly depends on engagement, so it‘s more likely to stay afloat if it’s provocative.
- Then, at the platform level, sites faced with the decision of what to show their users, also face a beauty contest: they select what is most likely to be liked. The perverse result is an eternal perpetuation of groupthink, as contributors facing a „likability selection“ are unfree in what they submit. If it’s deemed not controversial enough/not likable enough, they will wither away. So they keep perpetuating the ever same content and jokes.
Karma is a very poor proxy for post or poster value because it's cumulative.
Example: Stackoverflow has no way to distinguish between a poor post and a good post that's too recent to have acquired many upvotes. Likewise karma provides no useful distinction between someone who has been posting for years and someone who has just joined. (Also applies to Reddit and HN.)
In fact markets are perfect examples of Keynesian groupthink. The goal of most investment decisions isn't to assess intrinsic value or potential, but to second guess how everyone else in the market will estimate their ability to profit from collective average estimates of value/potential.
This leads to investment distortions where investors would rather chase potential unicorns - because of the explosive IPO potential - than invest in unexciting but solid businesses with stable but undramatic growth prospects.
Also, give people a vote budget so they think about whether they really need to vote. Maybe 5 votes per day. For whatever reason I can only write 5 posts per day here, so I try to use them wisely. Same should go for votes.
But what other resource than the crowd is readily available to curate?
Non curated public discussions are absolute garbage, so I'll take a flawed curation over none every time.
In any case, the number of points for a particular post is only visible to the author of that post, so even if a post has a large number of upvotes, it won't really stand out other than being close to the top of the main thread (or subthread).