Submission gamification and the "karma" problem
I did some reading about the trust system listed in future goals today. I think that's pretty good for moderation, but one thing that I wanted to open a discussion about is submission gamification within ~, but not specifically with regards to trust/responsibilities, but one that encourages good quality submissions, or at least will isolate bad quality submissions.
With sites like reddit and others, where you have a singular generic Who's Line Is It Anyway style points system or "Karma" the acquisition of "Karma" is a driving factor for submitting content to the site. However, with this system it tends to encourage content that goes viral, hence we see the /u/GallowBoob's of the world producing low-effort content or free-booting other people's content for "karma profit".
I don't particularly think this is a very healthy system for content as a whole, but it does seem to achieve viral attention & interest and a somewhat constant stream of stuff (not necessarily good).
Someone in the Promotion thread had suggest gamifying getting the invites out there which got me thinking (although, not on board with that particular idea).
With comments tags we can categorize the type of comment we're seeing, and hopefully in the future filter the content we're seeing. If the submission incentives were based around tags instead of androgynous points of no meaning, perhaps we could get members actively seeking positive tags, similar to how someone aiming to become part of the moderation apparatus would seek this "trust" goal.
People seeking to be on top of the [Unbiased] or [Thought provoking] tags would (at least on the surface) be generally trying to produce unbiased and thought provoking content (bot voting & bullshit aside).
And people like /r/GallowBoob may become king of [Viral] or [shitpost] but we'd have the ability to filter those tags away and let people that want to meme it up meme it up on their own and not drown quality content.
Obviously this is all idealistic on paper, but with how much effort quality posting takes compared to shit-posting it'd be nice to try and give a little recognition (similar to this trust system) to those who strive for it, and not drawing the ire of unfounded censorship trolls/complaints for other areas.
I like this idea, it kinda reminds me of /r/changemyview's tracker of the people who have changed the most views over the last month etc., but on steroids.
As Xbox achievements have amply demonstrated, people will go to great lengths to unlock imaginary points -- why not set up that system to be constructive while you're at it?
Additionally, I think both your trust rating within a group and (possibly) your own rating in similar tags should factor into how much weight the tag you assign ends up with.
This sets up a system where power-users can give incentives to other users for good content, while if you're a user that likes to crack jokes you might tag other people with similar senses of humor, etc.
I like the idea of giving internet points for different types of content, and then letting users choose what they like better.
On amazon I look for products rated 4 and above, why not look for comments from users rated better?
Yeah, I am wary of gamification as well... it's not always bad, but if executed poorly it can be disastrous. Gamification can provide good incentives for people to continue contributing but unless you want it to backfire you need to make sure you reward behavior you want to see and discourage/punish behavior you don't. I think your suggestion of rewarding people who consistently earn "quality contribution" related tags can definitely be a good way to accomplish that.
@deimos has yet to really talk about this mechanic all that much, but one idea he came up with was giving users a "supervote" (similar to reddit gold but without the payment involved) that is perhaps weighed by their trust in a community, and perhaps the # of supervotes they have to use per day based on their useful activity there (e.g. time spent correcting tags, fixing title errors, etc). We haven't really fleshed the idea out, to solve all the potential problems, but I think it has merit and is worth exploring. Supervotes could also be a really good way to encourage people to take their time responding to things rather than rushing to be first since even if they are 2 hours late to a discussion, if their comment is really good it could be supervoted to the top rather quickly.
This is something that I think about a lot, and am trying to be very careful with. Gamification can work extremely well, but that's also what makes it dangerous. When you turn something into a game, there will always be people that try to "win", and if you didn't design the game carefully you can end up with having completely wrong behaviors incentivized.
For example, on Stack Overflow, you get "points" for answering questions and having your answers voted up. Any vote on any answer is generally worth the same amount of points, so what's the best way to get points? It's certainly not by writing long, in-depth responses to difficult questions; it's by writing answers to extremely easy questions, as quickly as possible. They ended up inadvertently incentivizing people to post low-quality answers to low-quality questions. And then this also ended up encouraging people to post even more low-quality questions, because people learn that they can get easy questions answered extremely quickly by point-seekers.
This sort of thing happens a lot, both in gamification and actual games—the mechanics were designed in such a way that the "optimal strategy" involves doing something that's actually harmful to the environment as a whole, and the system that was supposed to improve participation ends up damaging things instead. So that's why I want to make sure that we're very careful about what we gamify or otherwise incentivize.
One thing that we need to keep in mind as well is that more activity is not always a good thing. We definitely need to reach the point where the site feels self-sustaining and like there's always a good flow of new posts, but there's another point where you get "too much" activity and it starts getting worse. A lot of people are probably familiar with this from subreddits—there always seems to be a size where they're really good, but then if they keep growing past that point, the quality starts to dive pretty rapidly (unless there's really strong moderation in place). So incentivizing growth/activity is something we need to be careful with.
All that being said, I do think that restricting it in some way to tags and/or sub-groups is definitely a good idea. That's kind of along the same lines as the group restriction that I mentioned in the page—there are a lot of similarities between tags and sub-groups, and I think we're going to end up with some interesting interactions between the two once the site gets active enough that we need to start splitting the groups up. We'll have to be careful though, I think certain tags make a lot more sense to be thought of like "sections" than others, and I'm not sure if the distinction will be something that we can pick up naturally/automatically or if it'll take some manual classification.
I spent a while answering Ansible questions on Stack Overflow. But then eventually I realized that I was averaging 0.5 upvotes per answer (that is, most of the time not even the OP voted, even if they left a comment saying it helped!), and that depressed me so much that I've stopped contributing to the site for the most part. I spent a much longer time helping people on the Ubuntu forums in years past, so my hypothesis is that it wasn't so much the lack of a (virtual) reward that turned me off, but the lack of a reward in a system that gives them out to other people. It's sorta like, if we're all volunteering it's fine, but if you start paying someone then you better pay everyone.
Yeah absolutely, that's an interesting side effect of gamifying something too. It's really discouraging when it feels like you're "losing" the game by behaving in a certain way, even if it really doesn't matter in the end. The existence of the system adds a type of judgment about how much value your behavior has.
One of the key problems with Stack Overflow is that points act as a strong 'gatekeeper' for activity. A new account almost can't participate at all, in any meaningful way, until they 'farm' some points. That further incentivizes the short/easy question & answer flow. For SO, the gatekeeping somewhat makes sense - you only need so many active editors and moderators, as frustrating as it might be to those who want to propose a simple edit.
I think soft-gatekeeping works better, and primarily as a "whoa slow down" measure to (a) help mitigate spam/abuse and (b) encourage new members of a community to take time to absorb & integrate. Care needs to be taken with (b) to avoid creating echo chambers, but the opposite end of the echo-chamber spectrum is that a group loses what made it special as it gets diluted by new members who haven't taken the time to fully appreciate how things are.
And now I feel like I'm rambling and have lost track of my point so I'll wrap up the comment.
I like that you included something like
[shitpost]and put it in a somewhat positive light. Some people spend their whole work day/at college/school being insightful and, as you put it, might want to meme it up when they're on the internet. To be quite honest, with all the serious discussion I've seen so far on tildes I'm starting to wonder if people who come here for the first time (once the alpha and beta stages are finished) would feel drawn to the content (well maybe I've been seeking groups that are too serious).