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[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I'm not sure about the number 7, however it something that should be tested, see what's the ideal number.

Like u/Tom_Bombadil said there should be a way to prevent people bypassing the rule from multiple accounts, I don't exactly agree with him on the karma thing, if reddit is an example, karma farming tends to attract the wrong type of people. Some propagandists might use that as a sign of credibility to their employers.

[–]thefadd 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Plastic.com was an original news and discussion site predecessor to reddit. The second of its kind after the original grand daddy of them all slashdot. Carl Stedman purchased the site from Automatic Media after AM failed to survive the ‘01 dot-com crash. There were many of us who complained about karma farming even back then (2006).

Since Carl was running the entire site himself, there were often month long outages with no notice to most of the community. During a particularly acute outage, I organized a team that designed an alternative discussion site which was never as popular but always had excellent discussions while it lasted because of a small number of dedicated users who relatively knew one another without ever having met. Actually I guess once upon a time some of us might have met at meetups.

To bring it back to the karma farming point. This was a major concern of ours. On Plastic.com, comments could only range from -1 (or something like that) to a max of five stars. But karma accumulated uncapped based on both comments and submissions (I forgot if they were capped as well or if you even got points for them). I will say, on Plastic, you had to reach certain thresholds in order to see the karma of those at or below your threshold. So, if your karma was 2692, anyone with 7,500, 9,000, or 24,000 karma just looked to you like they had 5,000 karma.

For the alternative site, we developed a formula wherein your score was also capped to reflect an approximate average of the score of your submissions/comments. I say approximate because part of the formula included slowly allowing older karma to expire away from the score.

Alternatively, as I’m thinking about it, what might be a good idea is to make karma increasingly difficult to attain, the more of it you attain. Diminishing returns as it were.

I never did like reddit’s Scoring system. It was supposed to “democratize” things but an insightful user could always tell from the beginning that it was just going create a race to the bottom.

I strongly prefer this site’s scoring system where all the votes are transparent. A typical heavy user who just wants to come chat and exchange ideas every day typically will care somewhat about having their score reflect their contributions but they won’t care about it to the degree that someone trying to game the system through karma farming will care.

The brilliance of the chan’s is that there are no rewards except to the degree that you’re able to distinguish yourself and become recognized through your writing style. The downside, of course, is that without at least nominally rewarding quality content, you get a ton of shitposting and trolling.

So, yeah, I think a formula that reasonably throttles karma accumulation is your answer.

The other thing that both Plastic.com and our alternative site had was a submission queue. This meant that every article submission had to go through an approval process. This, in and of itself was always somewhat controversial but when it worked, it worked well. Site members with a high enough karma score could vote and provide short feedback to submitted articles.

Editors then, at their own prerogative (supposedly taking guidance from users), would then accept or deny a write up. Sometimes write ups might be revised and resubmitted 3, 4, and 5 times. Obviously this puts a lot of onus on editors to be timely about things people want to discuss as they happen. And editors could and would simply approve things without feedback if they were timely and well down.

Of course this led to charges of favoritism and cabals etc but it also gave power users some sense of ownership over the site when used well. This also made for more of a magazine style since even important articles might take too long to come out but then the discussion might continue for a week.

[–]Tom_BombadilBombadildo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The other thing that both Plastic.com and our alternative site had was a submission queue. This meant that every article submission had to go through an approval process.

Built in censorship. Not cool.

Also, the mechanics seem a bit convoluded.

The elegant simplicity of Saidit's format make it more difficult for schemers to game the system; relative to other platforms.

The current system is quite robust. I mentioned the alternate account posting, cause I like to play the devil's advocate. I don't really think it's an issue; beyond spamming BS posts as a disruptive nuisance.
We've had to deal with this in the past, and a former nuisance is now a welcome ally, and posts quality submissions regularly.

The upvoting from multiple accounts is a major concern. This topic has been discussed in the past, and I think that the current system is working well.

Unless, I've overlooked something recent...

It's interesting to hear about the early predecessors. Is there an availabile history of what worked well, and what didn't. That would be interesting.

[–]thefadd 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There was once a wiki were we discussed and planned the plastic alternate. It was full of spam but it’s possible I have an archive. I do have an archive site of some static plastic pages that only went offline recently which I’m working on putting back.