
Why reddit sucks: The broken economics of karma - jeffdechambeau
http://jeffdechambeau.com/redditing-to-the-mean.html
======
ChuckMcM
The challenges of karmic currencies (sorry couldn't resist) are well known.

I totally agree that they tend to create a 'hive mind' type unity when there
is a scalar value. That an be good in the sense that the community converges
around a common set of shared beliefs and values, folks who don't share those
beliefs and values get signaled to leave, and typically it seems they do. The
'center mass' of that community moves but only slowly over time.

In one of pg's posts about the challenges of karma and Hackernews, I suggested
that an interesting experiment might be to try making it a vector rather than
a scalar. The idea is conceptually simple, you have 'more approve' and 'less
approve' (upvote and downvote) but the person whose comment you are posting on
defines the vector. It would work like this:

Alice upvotes Bob generates vector [1, Bob] Alice downvotes Chuck generates
vector [-1, Chuck] Bob upvotes Alice generates [1, Alice] Chuck dowvotes Bob
[-1, Bob]

So between Alice and Bob there are both positive upvotes. This creates a
[Alice, Bob] nexus, there are negative votes away from Chuck by both Bob and
Alice which creates a [Chuck, Chuck] nexus which is directionally 'opposite'
the [Alice, Bob] nexus.

Now if you work this over the community. Alice and Bob will have higher karma
in the [Alice, Bob] community and lower in the [Chuck, Chuck] community. So
when you show karma 'points' for Alice they represent Alice's conformance to
that community and show Chuck as negative in their community. But when Chuck
looks at his karma he is positive in the [Chuck, Chuck] nexus and Alice and
Bob are negative.

The question (and I don't know the answer of course)is whether or not you can
create a discussion site which evolves several simultaneous communities by
karma score within the same set of conversations. The ultimate test would be
that the comments you see are always interesting and insightful to you but
they may be differently rated than someone else seeing the same conversation.

Anyway, one of those 'if I had a spare weekend I'd try this...' kinds of
thoughts. The idea is public domain, I've got not personal claim on it, I'm
not even sure its implementable!

~~~
evgen
There is actually a lot of research in this specific area out there, so don't
worry about needing to give the idea away :)

Some systems I have noodled around with apply a similar set of vectors using
an advogato-like trust metric, but one where each viewer is their own source
of (advocato was a hierarchical system where trust flowed from a few sources,
given available resources today you can evaluate the flow network from each
viewer's individual perspective.) It is not too hard to extend such a system
to embody ideas like "expertise" where topics and keywords are passive nodes
in the graph so that Alice can upvote Bob for postings related to coding but
downvote him on postings about politics.

The research and mechanics are fun to play with and think about, but when you
start to analyze the system in terms of the sort of community it would
probably create you end up with a collection of smaller, partially overlapping
echo chambers. The real problem, IMHO, is that you need to get a little bit
more signal on the inputs. Up/down is just not enough. I think a system like
this can determine if you using up/down as agree/disagree or as
interesting/stupid, but if you mix those signals things appear to rapidly head
towards some unpleasant local minima. If there was a nice way to get users to
use a four or eight point voting box (permute agree/disagree, interesting/not-
interesting, and optionally add a null signal for each pair) then you could
really do some fun stuff for creating a neat alternative to all of the various
social news sites out there...

~~~
ChuckMcM
Interesting, the term 'advocato' doesn't yield much in the terms of research
along these routes, do you have a paper reference? (Lori Avocato does have a
few papers that pop up on scholar.google.com though, I bet she got kidded a
lot in grade school)

So perhaps the ideal karmic feedback device for this system is a compass rose
with a center button. This would be

    
    
                    <agree>
                       |
      <not this> - <perfect> - <more this>
                       |
                   <disagree>
    

The idea being that you could choose 'perfect' (which would exclude all other
choices) or you could choose one of agree/disagree _and_ one of not this/more
this.

The idea of course is that there is an inferred 'commonality' point and by
dropping these comments and stories you can have people give an indication of
where they sit relative to those inferred points.

And while it certainly might lead to a bunch of 'echo chambers' my experience
in such systems is that it pulls people out of those echo chambers into bigger
clumps than that.

~~~
evgen
Damn autocorrect; you catch one letter and miss the correction on the other
one -- two paras in I still had not noticed that my response appeared to be
discussing avocados.. "advogato" is the system I was referencing, and if you
want to dig into similar work check out papers by Cai-Nicolas Ziegler, some of
Pattie Maes old work, and Hugo Liu's work from before he joined Hunch.

------
ugh
I don’t see that. Racism (oh the racism), misogyny, homophobia (etc.) are
everywhere on Reddit. It’s full of shit. The content sucks.

My pet theory is that a lack of moderation is responsible for that. Ask
Science has excellent moderators and is doing well. Many other subreddits
(especially the big ones) pick a very laissez faire approach and consequently
manage to sound more like Stormfront in the end.

All the horrible people who are thrown out everywhere else can just continue
hanging out at Reddit.

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monkeyfacebag
This article makes a valid point about the hive mind, I'm just not sure that
it's reddit-specific. If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly
different behavior?

Further, there's an assumption here that everyone has an opinion on
everything, which isn't the case. I think a related, and potentially more
insidious problem is that the first well-crafted opinion in a thread tends to
inform the opinion of followers-on, accumulating karma all the while and
becoming the default position of the group.

~~~
spindritf
> If there were no karma on reddit, would we see markedly different behavior?

I remember wild disagreements on usenet that would never happen on reddit
because one side would quickly be voted down below the visibility level.

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webwanderings
Ironic that this post showed up at HN which is similar to reddit.

From my perspective, what you are saying makes sense. Except that both of
these platforms give less currency to the personalities/users and more
currency to the content. Making users the king over the content is exactly
what the typical Social-Networking model requires and I am for one glad that
in this day and age of Facebook and G+, the sanity still prevails somewhere
(though it has its cons as well).

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barrybe
There is a cost to voting on Reddit, it's the time/attention cost of moving
your mouse over and clicking a tiny button. Sometimes you even have to log in!
For people browsing a web site, time & attention is a significant currency.

It's true that karma is a flawed as an economic system or a measure of
contribution. But, who cares if the numbers are theoretically unsound? The end
goal is to generate usage, something which Reddit has been extremely
successful at.

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WalterSear
you are using it wrong. subscribe to stuff that interests you. don't subscribe
to subreddits you aren't. problem solved

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BiWinning
uh yeah reddit is a pos full of mediocre tools, I don't need some butthurt to
write a blog post about it but thanks I guess.

~~~
jeffdechambeau
You got my number bro.

