About the Karma algebra...

[Lionel Dricot]

Hello,

I've been thinking a bit about the Karma-magical-mystery thing and
here are some ideas I've got :

1) The decrease rate must only be proportionnal to your actual karma
and nothing else. It must not take care about when you've got those
point.
ATM, it seems that one karma point lost for a given time and decrease.
It's not really funny because it means that if you had a big burst of
activity 2 months ago (and then a big burst of karma), you will have a
big fall of karma today.
Also, it could mean that two people with the same karma on one day
could have different karma the day after eventough they did the same
amount of work after.

My suggestion is then : each day, decrease the karma by X% of its
current value. It would give use a nice anti-exponantial function. A
high karma will fall faster than a low karma. (it seems logical : in
order to keep a high karma, you have to provide a regular hard work.
But if a low karma can remain a low karma for a long time). It would
also ensure that you never really drop to 0 (you don't loose all your
experience). Also, a long time and regular user will have easily an
higher karma than a new user, but if the new user can quickly gain as
much as karma as the long time user have.


2) Displaying only the logX of the Karma. ATM, karma value is a bit of
a pinball score : nobody really cares about the last 3 numbers. When
you have2000 of Karma and you saw someone with 2900, you think : well,
we have nearly the same karma ! (altought there is 150% more work !)
There is also a too big difference between top5 (150 000 !!) and
someone who translate one or two sentence every day (150). I know that
the work is not the same, but I think it's really encouraging when you
can grow quickly at first.
In this aspect, the karma system of GNOME bugzilla works very well.
Best contributor have 25-26. Experienced users have 14-15 but you
quickly go from 0 to 5 then to 10 if you are regular.
Displaying the Log is IMHO a real reward for new contributor. Then,
each step becomes harder and you want to work harder and harder
without noticing it.


3) Karma reward..

It's a more experimental idea, but maybe we have to think about some
extra karma bonus. For example, if someone was a great help to you on
IRC or for a documentation or something, it might be interesting to
give him some karma. I know that there would be a lot of people
abusing quickly of such a system. This is only an idea.. We can for
example imagine that you can only give 1% of your karma to someone and
that you can't give it more than once per day or something like that.
You've also to write a short description of why you are given some
karma and it would be public on the LP karma-list.

It might be a karma reward for people who write documentation or are
doing support on forums/IRC...

We could also imagine a karma reward for special duty or even a
karma-based bounty system ;-)

...
..
Ok, I'll stop here


I know that we don't work for karma, but karma is fun. It's like you
were playing a big game and that's really fun. It could be a
motivation for a new user to deep into the community. It is also
useful to know what trust you can have when someone telling you to do
something. When I do bug triaging, I often look at the Karma of people
to quickly see if they are experienced users with Launchpad and Ubuntu
or not.

Thank you for reading, have a good day everyone :-)

Lionel (Ploum)