Polls are far from the most “profitable” karma-hoarding exploit available.
E.g., I could probably write a script with a few days research that would create a new account, log in, and upvote every single one of my comments for a boost of several hundred karma. Run that script once a day and within a month I’d be on the top-ten list.
But… so what? I’d be disconnecting a rewards system from the behavior it was designed to reward and simply triggering it manually. More succinctly: I’d be wireheading. While I don’t endorse wireheading, I do endorse the freedom to choose it, at least in the absence of negative externalities.
Admittedly, in this case there would arguably be negative externalities: this practice makes karma scores less reliable measures of whatever-they-measure-now, so if I value measuring whatever-that-is, then this practice removes some value from this site for me, and is perhaps worth preventing on those grounds.
And perhaps the same is true for other “exploits,” like polls and so forth.
I don’t find this too compelling, as I don’t think karma scores are particularly reliable measures of anything important now (though I do enjoy watching the numbers climb up).
But if I did, I would prefer to concentrate my attention on the big exploits, not the minor ones.
Polls are far from the most “profitable” karma-hoarding exploit available.
E.g., I could probably write a script with a few days research that would create a new account, log in, and upvote every single one of my comments for a boost of several hundred karma. Run that script once a day and within a month I’d be on the top-ten list.
But… so what? I’d be disconnecting a rewards system from the behavior it was designed to reward and simply triggering it manually. More succinctly: I’d be wireheading. While I don’t endorse wireheading, I do endorse the freedom to choose it, at least in the absence of negative externalities.
Admittedly, in this case there would arguably be negative externalities: this practice makes karma scores less reliable measures of whatever-they-measure-now, so if I value measuring whatever-that-is, then this practice removes some value from this site for me, and is perhaps worth preventing on those grounds.
And perhaps the same is true for other “exploits,” like polls and so forth.
I don’t find this too compelling, as I don’t think karma scores are particularly reliable measures of anything important now (though I do enjoy watching the numbers climb up).
But if I did, I would prefer to concentrate my attention on the big exploits, not the minor ones.