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I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement. Kar

I can't speak for PG but being in the middle of designing a karma system for our application, karma is an incredibly powerful tool to encourage engagement. Karma's value to the casual visitor is in communicating quality content that's been flagged by the community worker bees - the karma "waggle dance" :) From that perspective you want to be critical and only add weight to the "best things". However karma also plays a very significant role in guiding people as to how to modify their behaviour such that the community appreciates them. We all want to be liked by communities we identify with and karma is a powerful tool to see how we can "fit in". Karma is an incredibly powerful tool to communicate in a very discrete way to new community members how they can establish themselves. As the karma-moderator I find myself looking to give the community ways award karma wherever I can. I'm not worried about how insignificant the effort that it was rewarding; all I want to do is give people encouragement when they do something (anything) the community appreciates.

kstenerud 14y ago
Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob. This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc). The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.

kstenerud 14y ago

Karma is a tool to promote social cohesiveness in a group. By allowing peers to reward and punish others, it provides a "majority rules" code of conduct that is as fluid as the whim of the mob. This is good for building a sense of community where in-person interaction is infeasible, but it also brings with it the bad qualities (group think, punishment of new ideas that contradict the norm, cliques, personality cults, etc). The good news is that there are oddballs in every group who ignore the social rules (karma) and present ideas that are novel (but perhaps unpalatable) to the group despite the meting out of punishments (which are ignored). They are the antibodies that fight off the cancerous growth of tribalism.