I am excited to see how this works as social software.
I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say, discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game.
I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation without the built in popularity contest.
At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is all karma game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are nicely aligned. Very clever.
I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun". Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good answers to technical questions.
I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say, discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game.
I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation without the built in popularity contest.
At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is all karma game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are nicely aligned. Very clever.
I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun". Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good answers to technical questions.