[maemo-community] Sprint task: Refine the karma system

[From: Sebastian 'CrashandDie' Lauwers]

Valerio,

Thanks for putting this discussion up.

Now, I'm not a big supporter of karma at all. I believe it is a flawed
system which encourages cheating and ego-trips, and neither of those
have citizenship in this community.

There is no moderation on the discussion lists, which means anyone who
even pollutes the lists receives karma. Same thing for tmo, a lot of
redundant discussions mean a lot of redundant karma. At this point,
trolling is the best, effortless way of amassing heaps of karma. Sure,
off-topic doesn't count anymore, but I have yet to see (non-spam)
threads be deleted instead of locked in most other fora.

Rewarding app developers is a great and noble idea, however I honestly
doubt karma is the most appriopriate medium for it. More than
anything, I have to side with Dave and notice that this implementation
is highly developer-focal.

If I were crazy enough, I would post the suggestion that karma be
removed as a whole. If someone is active on tmo, you can see this by
his number of posts, and the thanks ratio. If someone offers well
formulated and mature advice, it should ring with your own mind. If a
dev writes a new app every week, I hope the website and app manager
will allow to "Browse by developer", and maybe the dev's stats will
indicate he has contributed positively on a number of occasions. The
real important thing is that if the main argument *for* karma is that
it allows newcomers to *know* who is *good*, and this is also
extremely flawed.

If there is a worry that false information may be spread by unsavy
users, then this is a useless worry; a waste of time. People don't
care about an unknown status on an unknown forum. They will care, and
will listen to any person who echoes their thoughts and resonates
their ideas. Whether that person is "true or false" doesn't matter,
and neither does their karma rating.

My main issue is that there is no such thing as karma in real life, so
why have any in our community? There is no formal rating of every
single individual on the planet on a website like rottentomatoes,
where people can check if they should agree or listen to this
politician or this sportsman; why would our community rating have
something which is, by lack of better words and lack of proof
impossible to create.

I like politician X, but how does he match up against the NFL Top 10?

Thanks for reading, and apologies about the rant.


On 12/01/2010, Attila Csipa <maemo at csipa.in.rs> wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 January 2010 20:46:14 Valerio Valerio wrote:
>> All suggestions/improvements are welcome, but please keep in mind that the
>> karma should be simple to calculate.
>
> Brainstorm seems to be missing (maybe the generic vote/comment score can
> apply, but surely proposals/solutions themselves are worth something ?).
>
> The current scoring scheme does not take into account developers who don't
> develop end-user software (like libraries). No idea how to honor that except
> for download/spike counting.
>
> Also, you don't mention bugs.maemo.org, with more karma for apps it's
> somewhat
> better (reporting 3-5 bugs, regardless of report quality was roughly equal
> to
> writing (!) an app). Anyhow, if possible, maybe it would make sense to
> include
> bug status (i.e. karma for developers fixing the bugs in question, or no
> karma
> for duplicate, invalid, etc bugs). Yes, this can be tricky with projects
> handling their own bugs, but then again, it's the same now - you get karma
> only for reporting bugs on projects in b.m.o.
>
> Overall, I feel maybe the new proposal is noticeably tilted towards
> developers, non-dev community members will very likely have difficulty
> 'keeping
> up' with dev karma (which may or may not be what you want).
>
> Regards,
> Attila
>
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