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Chasing the carrot on a stick: A karma system.
That silly number on someone's account. One that means nothing but is a weird goal people seek out.
Karma can be used to encourage user participation. Karma can also be bad and can cause someone to post with the intent of collecting karma instead of discussion.
Karma can be earned different way;
- the reddit way, you get karma for how many upvotes you get for things you post
- the gamefaqs way, you get 1 karma point for each day you log in
I'm not sure of any other ways, but I like silly numbers. Perhaps the 'trusted user' thing in the docs can somehow tie into a karma system.
What do you think about karma and how it could/should/would play out here?
I honestly think that karma is actually one of the things that also has a detrimental effect on a community. On reddit often you'll see that a lot of the people chasing karma are the people responsible for a huge volume of the easy to consume pow effort content.
Yep; fuck Karma, it's only ever been good as a rough indicator of the age of an account or how likely the commenter said something interesting, funny, or used sockpuppets to upvote themselves.
If there's going to be a metric, it shouldn't be used as a generic catch-all that only works as a rough indicator.
Well, karma's going to play out a little differently here than elsewhere, since karma (or rep, here) is specific to each group or subgroup (and may flow up, down, or both in a hierarchy depending on which is appropriate).
On reddit, people want front-page major karma action and repost crap in easy defaults to get it, to boost their massive sitewide scores and get into places like /r/centuryclub. It's very openly a sitewide score metric. The fact that half of reddit uses automod to block accounts with low karma also exacerbates the problem.
Here, I think there's a chance that since it's community-specific, it won't be as likely to slide into bad behavior. I could be wrong of course. We want people to enjoy the community, not play the 'game' like on reddit. Some people will undoubtedly try to game it (like the guys collecting mod slots on reddit) - but is it going to be as easy for them here? They have to post good content, and we will have mechanisms to deal with reposting.
Also the rep/karma here will be constantly decaying over time, to make sure users who were inactive and come back after long time periods take a breath and learn how the place has changed since their last visit.
Well, I hope it was clear I am talking about the reddit kind of karma. Though I think that any system that prominently displays points to be gathered will be vulnerable for this.
We are going to have something similar to karma but in the form of the trust system which has actual meaning behind it unlike karma. Trust will give people access to tools not available to other new/low trust users, like the ability to edit tags and submission titles, etc. However before we can implement that we need a changelog/audit system to make people don't abuse those powers. All of this is coming, we are just in the very early alpha stages. See: Mechanics (Future) for more.
It's important to realize that trusting a user to remove or tag posts is separate from acknowledging they contribute well to communities. I know a fair number of moderators on reddit who were good posters who abused their mod privileges.
That being said, I think some form of a feedback loop (separate from trust) is important for encouraging good discussion. I'm not sure of the best way to implement it, but if there's one lesson to be learned from reddit it's that a score-based karma system can quickly devolve into gaming the system. Maybe a tier-based system would be better for users.
We do plan on having some visual representation of trust but we just haven't decided on the specific way yet. Having a separate "score" outside of trust is something we haven't really considered, and probably should though, so thanks.
I recall that Slashdot at least used to have a tier-based system, with a relatively easily-obtainable highest tier, and no visible number of points. I'd support this form of feedback, and perhaps some form of tag-based feedback (eg, does a user tend to receive a higher than usual number of certain tags?). This would allow users to see whether another user is new or established in the community, without turning it into a competition that encourages low-quality content the way that reddit karma does. Users should not derive any benefit, real or imagined, from amassing large quantities of votes.
Thus I feel that for this to work, the actual number of points should not be visible to users, only the tiers, and that any user who has been moderately active should be the highest tier. The points should not be a competition between regular users.
I would agree with this. I think that a tier-based system is the superior approach, as a point-driven system only encourages gaming the system - like the highest-karma users on Reddit that do nothing but take already-posted content and repost it countless times.
Indeed, that's where we landed when we talked about this earlier. Level-based access, with each level handing out a small increase in user power. We'd also have abuse-tracking systems, so when people are found to be abusing a feature, they lose access to it.
There will be 'points' under the hood tracking when people level-up, but we don't need to show those points to anyone for them to operate.
On neogaf, i think, they have a tier system for posting. Something like 1-100 comments/posts = new user, 100-200 = regular.. Etc.
They also lock creating new topics until you are a regular user, new users will only be able to comment.
I've read that. It just wasn't particularly clear how imaginary internet points were going to be earned.
That's because it hasn't fully been decided yet. Once the changelog/audit system is in place we can work from there but trust will likely start with seeing if people contribute useful tags and title edits first. Remember, this is early alpha so while we have spent a great deal of time thinking about these things, it's mostly theoretical at this point. We need to see how they work in the real world before any concrete plans can be made or written about since they may change.
We do appreciate the feedback now and as we continue to develop these features though, so thanks.
We talked about this a bit previously here as well, probably worth reading for people interested in the topic: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a6/submission_gamification_the_karma_problem
One thing that came to mind, after reading that was what if there was a tag you can give a comment or post that essentially gives them 1 point of karma. That way the reading user has to intentionally think, "this is good enough for karma". I guess that plays off the "gilding" that reddit does. A way to defeat gaming for this would be to have that "karma" tag not show on comment/topics but only to the end users and wouldn't effect the actual vote score of the posts.
One interesting thing that could be done with the gamefaqs karma system is to turn it on it's head.
~ doesn't have any incentive to addict you. However, many link aggregators can be addicting. It could possibly reward you for engaging with it in a more healthy way, like giving you points for not logging in.
I started a discussion on this a few days ago you can view it here.
In it I discussed my thoughts about karma & gamification, and the ideas I had for trying to tune the system to produce positive/constructive submissions.
I feel like separating the concept of user karma from post votes is important; there are many people in my community who have delivered nothing but high quality work, but nonetheless I cut them out of my life because as people they were toxic. I think that, as a community, tildes would suffer more than it would gain when implementing any system that tries to tie the two together.
We're aware of that issue and trust will most likely only be tied to submission/comment votes in that if other high trust users vote them up it will impart some small measure of trust... but most of the trust will likely to derived from judgment of actions. E.g. If someone fixes a tag from
mis spelledtomisspelledand other high trust users approve that change then the original person who made the correction will gain some small measure of trust.Honestly I think karma is the reason Reddit has a reposting problem. People repost to earn pseudo-internet-points and the community's overall experience is diminished... in my humble opinion, I think Tildes should stay out of a gamified karma system that doesn't have too many benefits... though this begs the question, if and how people will be rewarded for good posts
I agree that karma is an important feature that should be added in some fashion.
I was thinking for a previous project of using a karma system to denote a user as trusted poster. Going for this model though you would likely have to do a certain percent of votes on a post would be counted towards karma. Also having a threshold of like the top 5-20% of users in a particular group would be trusted.
If karma and being a trusted user are not linked maybe karma allows users to do extra stuff in their posts. Ideas I have include different styling of text like bold or underlined maybe even the option to spend karma to boost a post ranking from the start?
This feels as though it would pose a significant risk of devolving into a competition for points, as the points would actually become valuable. Submitting popular but low-quality content to obtain points and then sell accounts to advertisers so they could use the boost to post ranking and increased style options could be a viable business. In any case, it would create an elite class of posters able to drown out discussion and posts of others.
I'd recommend against having a points-based karma system at all, but I'd particularly argue against points being useful.
Yes I totally agree now that you mention that.
4chan (and the other *chan boards really) has no karma system, but does show the number of replies a post has. On some boards (equivalent to "topics" or "subreddits" or something similar), posters would try to post purposefully emotional content to garner a reply, but oftentimes the reward was getting people to talk about your topic.
4chan also allows you to post new topics, but after a certain amount of time with no activity, these topics would be pruned, so there is a certain amount of low-effort content posted in order to garner replies. This also creates long-running topic-based threads (such as Japanese Commercial Thread, or Thinkpad General thread) which are general enough interests that they would ganer multiple replies.
Can't karma be monetized to some extent? It's hard to reward someone for being a great contributor without possibly bringing other things into the mix along with it. It makes it a lot easier to see who the influencers are and possibly could lead to them abusing the system for an outside entity. If that's way off base let me know.