I’m sympathetic to the intent, but trying to measure the whole space of a social community with a numeric system without giving a lot of thought to exactly what you want to do sounds like an endeavor doomed to a series of unsatisfactory mechanisms with ever-increasing complexity. You can’t do an ultimate karma system for measuring everything satisfactorily, at least without a karma vector around the same dimensionality as the state space of a human mind. Barring that, you need to have a clear idea of what exactly do you wish to accomplish, and how much are you willing to pay for it in increased user interface complexity, increased usage complexity (figuring out exactly what you’re supposed to do with each message) and unintended consequences from people using the system in different ways as you intended.
So, I’m not really sold on things like this from a “would-be-nice” perspective, as the increased complexity would be a constant cost to the system from then on, and a whole new area of possible unintended consequences would open up.
I would like to see some experimentation on what works and what doesn’t with various types of mechanical forum systems though. It’s just a bit hard to do that systematically, since forums need to build communities to work, and the communities form their subculture partly around the particular mechanics of the forum.
People can always set up conventions that emerge from community culture in place of site server enforced stuff, like the PGP point thing in the comments here.
I’m sympathetic to the intent, but trying to measure the whole space of a social community with a numeric system without giving a lot of thought to exactly what you want to do sounds like an endeavor doomed to a series of unsatisfactory mechanisms with ever-increasing complexity. You can’t do an ultimate karma system for measuring everything satisfactorily, at least without a karma vector around the same dimensionality as the state space of a human mind. Barring that, you need to have a clear idea of what exactly do you wish to accomplish, and how much are you willing to pay for it in increased user interface complexity, increased usage complexity (figuring out exactly what you’re supposed to do with each message) and unintended consequences from people using the system in different ways as you intended.
So, I’m not really sold on things like this from a “would-be-nice” perspective, as the increased complexity would be a constant cost to the system from then on, and a whole new area of possible unintended consequences would open up.
I would like to see some experimentation on what works and what doesn’t with various types of mechanical forum systems though. It’s just a bit hard to do that systematically, since forums need to build communities to work, and the communities form their subculture partly around the particular mechanics of the forum.
People can always set up conventions that emerge from community culture in place of site server enforced stuff, like the PGP point thing in the comments here.