LW seems to reward actually doing things disproportionally little compared to talking about them. My suggestion for this are “bounty” pools for doing various things, and when anyone does them they are rewarded the karma in the pool.
Example: someone points out a problem with the LW Source, but rather than nothing happening unless some hero does it by themselves, there is a consensus reached in the comments and someone ends up proposing a bounty, then many people who might not otherwise have been interested give a bit of karma, and the pool ends up much larger than could be expected to gain from just commenting out after the problem was solved and asking for it. This motivates someone to do the change, then an admin verifies it and the pool is given to the person who fixed the problem.
I have a visceral negative reaction to all the random things people want to use “karma” for. Also I have no idea what The Nebulous Community (TM) wants to use karma for. It seems to be a “numbers go up people get happier” + anti-spam + anti-troll + “posts and comments have numbers why don’t we sum them” metric. Do I have that about right?
Karma Bounties
LW seems to reward actually doing things disproportionally little compared to talking about them. My suggestion for this are “bounty” pools for doing various things, and when anyone does them they are rewarded the karma in the pool.
More info here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/56p/do_meetups_really_have_to_go_on_the_front_page/3wfn?context=4#comments
Example: someone points out a problem with the LW Source, but rather than nothing happening unless some hero does it by themselves, there is a consensus reached in the comments and someone ends up proposing a bounty, then many people who might not otherwise have been interested give a bit of karma, and the pool ends up much larger than could be expected to gain from just commenting out after the problem was solved and asking for it. This motivates someone to do the change, then an admin verifies it and the pool is given to the person who fixed the problem.
I have a visceral negative reaction to all the random things people want to use “karma” for. Also I have no idea what The Nebulous Community (TM) wants to use karma for. It seems to be a “numbers go up people get happier” + anti-spam + anti-troll + “posts and comments have numbers why don’t we sum them” metric. Do I have that about right?
I tend to treat it as an automated implementation of the Status system humans have but doesn’t work well here due to Dunbars number type problems.
yep.
Tentatively—a separate count of accomplishment points which are given for posts and comments about getting something done.