
The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma" - rms
http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html
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joe_the_user
There can't be general purpose reputation online. It's meaningless. There can
only be reputation for specific behavior. Someone who has a lot of positive
reputation on Ebay is reasonably likely to fulfill your order, assuming your
is similar to the previously filled orders - check if all his/her other orders
were for $1 and your's is for a million.

Just about any other karma system winds up measuring how hyper-active someone
is online. My karma score tells you nothing about me at all except that I'm
here a lot and talkative.

This can be good thing. Much real life bad or good reputation is unjustified.

~~~
rms
I don't know that it's going to happen anytime soon, but I can see exchanges
between karma and real currency eventually leading to a reputational economy.
See Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
<http://craphound.com/down/download.php> I wish that pg would start allowing
karma transfers here so we could start experimenting and I could cash in all
of my stupid points, but that experiment is not one of his goals.

For a while I've told myself that I'd like to auction this username for
charity, mostly just to see what happens, though I like the idea of converting
my years of activity here into a charitable donation.

On Hacker News, karma really does just measure activity. My point is that it
is theoretically possible to give karma more meaning than it has today.

~~~
Bluem00
You might be interested in the book "Accelerando" <
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441014151/charlieswe...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441014151/charlieswebsi-20)
>, as one of its plot points is that the basic unit of exchange in the economy
changes from money to reputation.

~~~
jerf
It is also available online, with full consent of the relevant rights owners:
<http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/>

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jlees
One way around the mafia problem is a kind of normalisation, though it has its
own flaws. A negative vote from someone who always gives negative votes counts
for less than a negative vote from someone who generally gives positive votes.
You can add in thresholding and voting ring detection for some fun, resulting
in normalisation of their opinion to some degree.

There's also normalisation on the other end, how many of the total votes are
negative or positive - but this doesn't really work unless there's a
transaction cost, as fake accounts can shill the voting.

~~~
Perceval
One of my ideas about moderation and rating systems is that the act of
moderation tells us more about the person doing the moderating than it does
about the story/post/person being moderated.

If we think about moderation as _relational_ rather than objective or absolute
or aggregating, we can treat the user's moderation activity as their
particular web of relations to various other objects (stories/posts/users).

We could then drop all these relationships into an algorithm built to examine
large matrices of relationships, say... PageRank. I wrote a tl;dr piece on
moderation and online communities here:
<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000>

~~~
jlees
Funny, I've also been doing some thinking about moderation and
implicit/explicit voting recently. Fascinating topic. Here's my piece:
[http://www.trendpreneur.com/online/link-voting-real-time-
res...](http://www.trendpreneur.com/online/link-voting-real-time-respect/)

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anigbrowl
Everyone has a different idea of what karma should be for. Conspiracy
theorists trust other conspiracy theorists and loathe anyone with a mundane
explanation. Bicyclists like each other more than car owners.

So what you need is to give everyone their own karma _table_ to rate other
users. You arrive, and you are neutral towards everyone else. After a while,
you vote some people up and some people down. As you establish what your own
standards are, you are establishing your own weighting of different social
behaviors. Your weightings are likely to correlate strongly with those of
other users - most likely the majority group, but maybe you have a lot in
common with an established minority crowd (eg UFO 'believers'). New encounters
can then be assigned provisional karma scores based on the average scores
handed out by the group with whom your own weightings correlate most strongly.
Thus, if you are a UFO believer you will see provisional negative karma for
the science geek who loves to debunk UFO theories, while if you are yourself a
science geek you'll see provisional negative karma for UFO believers in
accordance with the fact that your karma votes correlate strongly with
similarly-minded people.

 _Characterizations of UFO believers, scientists etc. are based on internet
stereotypes, not responsible for lost ego or damaged feelings_

Obviously, a system like this with N users has N^2 karma scores and the cost
of administering the karma system increases exponentially compared to linear
user growth. But there are a lot of algorithms you could use to flatten this,
since in practice there will be groups whose membership follows a power-law
distribution, rather than purely atomistic noisy preferences. Another
possibility is a local (client-side) karma table with p2p lookup.

Another downside is that groups will tend toward partisanship since there will
not be any universal penalties for most unpopular views (obviously, some views
are so extreme that they'll never gain any social traction); even minority
thinkers will have a circle of friends who share an unpopular belief and
provide mutual support (as can be seen across the internet). But this system
accommodate pluralities, whereas attempts at universal karma result either in
relative homogeneity (vast #s of echo chamber websites) or else the complete
breakdown and abandonment of the karma concept, with attendant signal
degradation (eg 4chan/b/).

~~~
eru
> Obviously, a system like this with N users has N^2 karma scores and the cost
> of administering the karma system increases exponentially compared to linear
> user growth.

Do you imply that N^2 is exponential? Or is there another way to understand
your sentence.

The rest of your post is quite insightful.

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alttab
The article outlines only one major reason for karma-based systems.

People can get addicted to their rating, creating "karma whores" and the like.
This is nothing that probably hasn't been discussed here and on other
communities.

Its a balance between the web-site operators wanting people to come back (what
is my karma now after that awesome comment?), and pissing people off due to
the problems karma systems introduce along with a general decline in community
quality (Reddit anyone?).

Is it too much to ask for people to just have online conversations for the
sake of getting involved? The only real CLEAN motivation is intrinsic, but
that says a lot more about human nature than online rating systems.

~~~
camccann
_People can get addicted to their rating, creating "karma whores" and the
like._

A counterpoint to this: If a karma system reliably rewards beneficial
behavior, "karma whores" can potentially create a lot of real value for more
casual members of the community (at the cost of possibly some irritation from
active but not addicted members). This may not be possible in all communities,
of course, but here's at least one example:
<http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet>

~~~
nazgulnarsil
you've just reinvented the invisible hand concept.

for the record I agree completely. checks and balances on negative behaviors
is stupid and has never worked. what you need to do is set up the incentives
so that everyone's goals are complementary anyway. then the users police
themselves because everyone is benefiting. you've turned a zero-sum game
(status) into positive sum.

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chrischen
Personally I think it would be better to only allow upvote, and reserve
flagging for inappropriate comments. I don't feel it's necessary to downvote
anything except if it's racist, offensive, or in any other ways inappropriate.

I mean I saw a person who was obviously not an English speaker post a hard to
understand comment. He was voted down a couple of times but I can't understand
why. His comment wasn't offensive. He may have had some misunderstanding and
some trouble communicating but I don't think he had any negative intent. It
seems in these cases negative voting serves no purpose. If you just want good
comments highlighted, upvoting should be enough. Flagging can be used for
innapropriate stuff.

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raintrees
What about using a small graph instead of a sum total to show karma
earning/loss over time?

