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This is something I've been mulling over for our site (one of the big US newsmags) which gets a lot of comments but has very limited community. One of the appro

This is something I've been mulling over for our site (one of the big US newsmags) which gets a lot of comments but has very limited community. One of the approaches I've decided to explore a little further is tying your karma to the votes on other articles, outside of a certain threshold. I'd like to use the threshold to prevent people from getting "bombed" if they upset the wrong person. The general hypothesis is that there is a relationship between the quality of your contribution and your support of quality contributions from others. the general implementation idea is that when you vote, it impacts your karma. For example, if you upvote an unhelpful but witty comment and others come and vote it down, you'd lose karma. If you voted up a comment that others also voted up, you'd gain karma. There are a lot of ways to game such a system, so you'd need to be really careful about the side-effects of this (it should probably only account for a small portion of your karma, for example) but I think it has promise nonetheless. I like to think of it sort of as Page Rank for comment karma.

hugh 18y ago
Wouldn't this just encourage people to "pile on" by upvoting things which already have high scores, or downvoting things which already have low scores?
- smhinsey 18y ago
  That's why I emphasize that the key is making sure you set thresholds around it. For example, don't perform the calculation when the post has more than a 10% distribution in votes, or you could add a freshness component, so you would only gain the karma when you are the first upvote on something that ended up being popular.
  - meredydd 18y ago
    Counting 'freshness' is even worse - that just turns the whole thing into a game of speculation. "Piling on" to existing popular consensus does enough damage to originality, but what you propose would explicitly reward a proactive chase of the lowest common denominator. For an exploration of similar ideas, take a clicky: http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473 http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473 (I actually think I might have seen here first, but forgotten to save it...)
    - smhinsey 18y ago
      It's worse only in the narrow context in which it's allowed to be dominant. This isn't a zero sum game. Taking the time differential between when a contribution was posted and when it first met a "value" threshold (say, 5 upvotes) and rewarding one of the people who voted in the affirmative by giving them, say, .25 karma points for it, does not reward the lowest common denominator. My hypothesis is that it might have exactly the opposite effect by encouraging those who might otherwise be excessively frugal with their votes to use their voting opportunities in a meaningful way. In other words, if you want to look at this in absolutes and think that when I say that I think it's a good idea to take a given variable into account that I am somehow implying that the variable is free of all bias and in every other way perfect, you are making a mistake. You will never have high confidence for all of your variables when they describe human interaction, but that low confidence doesn't speak to the utility of the variable, it speaks to its importance in the overall calculation.
      - meredydd 18y ago
        I understand that it's a small component of the overall system you envisage; I just believe that it's a small component pointing in the wrong direction. If you boil it down, my point is that while "do people like what I say?" is a suboptimal scoring criterion, "do most other people like the same things I say I like?" is likely to be significantly worse.
pg 18y ago
The problem with this kind of approach is that you reward people whose opinions are closest to the average. Those are not the smart people.
- smhinsey 18y ago
  You could end up biasing your community towards the mundane (the digg/fark model) if you aren't careful, but what I'm thinking about is something that instead of rewarding people who are "good voters" (for lack of a better term) instead seeks to reward those community members who consistently support high quality contributions. I define "karma" as a means of valuing your contributions to the community, and it seems that this ought not be dominated simply by what you contribute in a literal sense, but also in what you contribute by encouraging others by voting up their valuable contributions. If our definitions differ, I can see that being the cause of the disagreement.

hugh 18y ago

Wouldn't this just encourage people to "pile on" by upvoting things which already have high scores, or downvoting things which already have low scores?

smhinsey 18y ago
That's why I emphasize that the key is making sure you set thresholds around it. For example, don't perform the calculation when the post has more than a 10% distribution in votes, or you could add a freshness component, so you would only gain the karma when you are the first upvote on something that ended up being popular.
- meredydd 18y ago
  Counting 'freshness' is even worse - that just turns the whole thing into a game of speculation. "Piling on" to existing popular consensus does enough damage to originality, but what you propose would explicitly reward a proactive chase of the lowest common denominator. For an exploration of similar ideas, take a clicky: http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473 http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/473 (I actually think I might have seen here first, but forgotten to save it...)
  - smhinsey 18y ago
    It's worse only in the narrow context in which it's allowed to be dominant. This isn't a zero sum game. Taking the time differential between when a contribution was posted and when it first met a "value" threshold (say, 5 upvotes) and rewarding one of the people who voted in the affirmative by giving them, say, .25 karma points for it, does not reward the lowest common denominator. My hypothesis is that it might have exactly the opposite effect by encouraging those who might otherwise be excessively frugal with their votes to use their voting opportunities in a meaningful way. In other words, if you want to look at this in absolutes and think that when I say that I think it's a good idea to take a given variable into account that I am somehow implying that the variable is free of all bias and in every other way perfect, you are making a mistake. You will never have high confidence for all of your variables when they describe human interaction, but that low confidence doesn't speak to the utility of the variable, it speaks to its importance in the overall calculation.
    - meredydd 18y ago
      I understand that it's a small component of the overall system you envisage; I just believe that it's a small component pointing in the wrong direction. If you boil it down, my point is that while "do people like what I say?" is a suboptimal scoring criterion, "do most other people like the same things I say I like?" is likely to be significantly worse.

pg 18y ago

The problem with this kind of approach is that you reward people whose opinions are closest to the average. Those are not the smart people.

smhinsey 18y ago
You could end up biasing your community towards the mundane (the digg/fark model) if you aren't careful, but what I'm thinking about is something that instead of rewarding people who are "good voters" (for lack of a better term) instead seeks to reward those community members who consistently support high quality contributions. I define "karma" as a means of valuing your contributions to the community, and it seems that this ought not be dominated simply by what you contribute in a literal sense, but also in what you contribute by encouraging others by voting up their valuable contributions. If our definitions differ, I can see that being the cause of the disagreement.