4 ms·

I'm reminded of a game I used to play in middle school called MapleStory. It was a pretty generic, grindy MMORPG but one of its more mechanics was a 'reputatio

by jmduke 13y ago

I'm reminded of a game I used to play in middle school called MapleStory. It was a pretty generic, grindy MMORPG but one of its more mechanics was a 'reputation' stat that each character had, with no ostensible uses besides to tell who was well-liked and who wasn't. You could 'fame' someone and 'defame' someone once per day, similar to this system. As one might expect, the system never was as honest as you'd hope: you'd have massive "fame trading" rings, because what's the point of giving away your fame for the day if you don't get anything in return? And, more maliciously, there would be guilds and clans who'd designate targets to 'defame on sight': forty people defaming you over the course of a week would usually put you into the negative hundreds, sort of ruining that stat permanently (unless, of course, you 'bought fame'.)

pplrep 13y ago
I'm the creator of this website. I used to play mapelstory, too. And I used to read the sleepywood forums. I knew the GMs, stoveboy and all of them.
GuiA 13y ago
Some forum software (for example, the free SMF[1]) include a similar feature, where members can vote each other up/down. Now while on paper it's not very different from the reddit/HN/etc. karma system, in reality it is- on many such forums, the community is very compact[2], and there is a greater sense of member hierarchy (I believe that having picture avatars contributes to that, as they are very quickly remembered). The resulting social construct is often very interesting, with members staging coups against one another, trying to gain power (= being a moderator), and so on. I've spent many hours as a teenager in such communities in the early 2000s, and it was very entertaining and interesting in terms of human dynamics- pretty much cyberpolitics where the goal is to rule on a forum rather than a territory. I'm certain that there are tons of social experiments that can be done in the context of cyber-communities, and that what we have today (social news sites, social network) barely scratches the surface. [1]: http://www.simplemachines.org http://www.simplemachines.org [2]: that is, for any 2 random active members, the probability that they have posted in a same thread is much closer to 1 than on reddit/HN/etc.; this is definitely helped by the fact that threads tend to be linear in such forums

by jmduke 13y ago

pplrep 13y ago

I'm the creator of this website. I used to play mapelstory, too. And I used to read the sleepywood forums. I knew the GMs, stoveboy and all of them.

GuiA 13y ago

Some forum software (for example, the free SMF[1]) include a similar feature, where members can vote each other up/down. Now while on paper it's not very different from the reddit/HN/etc. karma system, in reality it is- on many such forums, the community is very compact[2], and there is a greater sense of member hierarchy (I believe that having picture avatars contributes to that, as they are very quickly remembered). The resulting social construct is often very interesting, with members staging coups against one another, trying to gain power (= being a moderator), and so on. I've spent many hours as a teenager in such communities in the early 2000s, and it was very entertaining and interesting in terms of human dynamics- pretty much cyberpolitics where the goal is to rule on a forum rather than a territory. I'm certain that there are tons of social experiments that can be done in the context of cyber-communities, and that what we have today (social news sites, social network) barely scratches the surface. [1]: http://www.simplemachines.org http://www.simplemachines.org [2]: that is, for any 2 random active members, the probability that they have posted in a same thread is much closer to 1 than on reddit/HN/etc.; this is definitely helped by the fact that threads tend to be linear in such forums