It does work well for MetaFilter, but voting seems to work okay here. What exactly would you describe as "a lot of problems"? What problems need to be solved?
What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for $5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated with privileges?
I'd completely forgotten about this. Having to review votes from other users feels like work to me though. Having the community arrive at the community rules with metamoderation isn't going to always go along with the goals of the site either I would have thought.
I wonder if a similar system would work where 1) regular users vote as normal 2) moderators who strictly stick to community guidelines vote (e.g. vote up comments that add to the discussion, vote down trolls, silly jokes and rude comments) 3) only votes from people whose votes are consistent with the moderators are weighted heavily.
Maybe you could even be rewarded with karma when a moderator agrees with you to encourage it instead of it being hidden. Obviously all these systems are open to abuse and problems but just throwing out ideas.
That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.
I think the best solution to maintaining the quality of a rapidly growing community/vote driven site is restricting the flow of new users by providing disincentives. Metafilter (for example) has a $5 sign up fee.
Requiring a small karma minimum before allowing users to vote on posts & comments, or submit new posts could work well. This way new users can only influence the community by engaging with it, which would filter out votes from casual users and trolls, while also giving new users a chance to grasp the community norms though participation.
Other approaches like vote-weighting and down-voting ignore the root of the problem, which is dilution of the community and its norms.
Metafilter does that, and I think that helps people continue a discussion that they are interested in, regardless of its effect on "reputation". HN does a similar thing with the "threads" link, but it only helps for conversations the user is active in (to encourage involvement?).
My thinking on late (and hence low-exposure) contributions is more along the lines of weighting. If 10 people read a comment and 5 upvote it, it should be rewarded similarly to a comment with 100 reads and 50 upvotes.
The idea is nice, but I think implementing something like that well is going to be very challenging.
One one hand, you'll have users trying hard to game the system (if you think karma is motivating, try actual money), populism, and on the other hand filter bubbles. I think these are strong forces, and it would be hard to stir it away from being full of low effort emotional-appealing posts.
I like the idea of a karma hurdle to vote on articles, but not to post comments. Since fewer people tend to comment than visit, this will allow a small number of people to act as effective gatekeepers.
I also like the idea of forcing people to solve a riddle or make a simple program in order to sign up. This can be gained, but your average Joe stupid person won’t bother.
What if people who up-vote nasty comments don't really do it consistently, they just vote a lot? Maybe votes need to be precious, so people use them more carefully. Slashdot addressed the problem by limiting the mod points available and introducing meta-moderation. Meta-moderation won't work in an up/down voting system like this, but limiting votes, for example to a certain number per day, is a powerful option. You could even have tiers, where people with more karma would get more votes per day. Maybe every 100 karma points gets you an extra vote per day.
I think making someone's karma filter subjective could solve the problem. Then it would also be hard to game the system, since you'd have to know how most people filtered karma.
This filter could either be based on how people vote, or using karma and something else as the criteria.
An example of the latter, I've thought the good comments would be those that maximize length and karma. That means they are both substantive and well written enough to hold people's attention. Plus, it's too long to be witty:) This could be implemented entirely client side without the need to open up voting data.
Finally, it'd fit great into the whole hacker mentality, since people could pass around and hack the best filters.
(note: this idea has been said by many others, I'm merely trying to perpetuate the meme)
It seems to work well. I am an occasional contributor so I don't have very much power there but I understand that communities collapse without this control since they get dominated by drive-by losers. I'm not one, but there's no signal I can provide that I'm not one. Metafilter has the model where you spend money as a signal that you're not one. I guess I'd pay $20 one-time as an upgrade that is revocable.
I am a Wikipedia auto-confirmed user, so that lets me make articles without needing to go through the process, so that's nice.
The problem with all of these sites is that they don't also police the opposite side: the obsessive guy who spends all his time on the site and attaches all of his identity to it so he is just a negative person despite having lots of 'karma'-equivalent.
It's like the value-to-community vs time-spent curve is like
In fact, maybe HN should have a high-karma warning. "This user spends so much time on HN they can't possibly be productive in real life. You are getting the town drunk, not the star of the pub"
I like the concept, but I'd recommend that you allow people to browse all submitted errors and provide solutions. And, you'll need to give an incentive for people to help. For example, have a list of "Top Problem Solves" or karma points.
What if you added a downvote multiplier, so if you get 5 downvotes it becomes $.50? With a max neg of score of -10. And same for downvoter. And you get meta mods who watch these mods to try to keep things from wratcheting in a runaway manner.
it punishes people for a lot of things: for being nice to others and responding to unresponded-to inquiries, for participating in lengthy discussions that don't particularly keep the majority of people's interest, expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..
why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.
Maybe have them
- delete posts that are meaningless (memes, 'me too', 'you suck', etc - aggressive post removal may 'feel' like censorship but I think it would be great, even if only to keep threads small
- move 'meta' posts into a separate thread (each article would have two threads - the 'regular' comments, and the 'meta' or 'off topic' section
- temp- or permaban accounts that post many comments that have to be deleted
- more controversial - investigate algorithmically found voting patterns, e.g. the same accounts always upvoting comments by the same user(s)?
Combined with a 'you get two posts for each post that scores +2 or higher, or 1 post every 3 days' to limit the amount of posts and incentivize people to may high quality posts (or at least posts that they think will score well).
What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?
eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.
Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.
(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).
I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.
Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".
That rate limiting idea sounds very good in principle.
Unfortunately it would make the part about karma that's already slightly broken IMO into a major breakage: You have to write scores of reasonably popular comments to collect as much good karma as a single successful submission tends to give. That's on top of commenting tending to be more work than submitting. I've spent as much as half an hour of research on some comments, just to make sure I've got the details straight.
What if you could buy 5 whuffies (or whatever points on here are called) for $5, but could only post comments if your score remained above zero? Or maybe something in the stackoverflow type scheme, where the points are correlated with privileges?
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