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 diffe

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