Group items tagged

"On Karma: Top-line Lessons on User Reputation Design In Building Web Reputation Systems, we appropriate the term karma to mean a user reputation in an online service. As you might expect, karma is discussed heavily throughout the more than 300 pages. During the final editing process, it became clear that a simple summary of the main points would be helpful to those looking for guidance. It seemed that our first post in over a month (congratulations on the new delivery, Bryce!) should be something big and useful... This post covers the following top-line points about designing karma systems, drawn from our book and other blog posts: * Karma is user reputation within a context * Karma is useful for building trust between users, and between a user and the site * Karma can be an incentive for participation and contributions * Karma is contextual and has limited utility globally. [A chessmaster is not a good eBay Seller] * Karma comes in several flavors - Participation, Quality and Robust (combined) * Karma should be complex and the result of indirect evaluations, and the formulation is often opaque * Personal karma is displayed only to the owner, and is good for measuring progress * Corporate karma is used by the site operator to find the very best and very worst users * Public karma is displayed to other users, which is what makes it the hardest to get right * Public karma should be used sparingly - it is hard to understand, isn't expected, and is easily confused with content ratings * Negative public karma should be avoided all together. In karma-math -1 is not the same magnitude as +1, and information loss is too expensive. * Public karma often encourages competitive behavior in users, which may not be compatible with their motivations. This is most easily seen with leaderboards, but can happen any time karma scores are prominently displayed. [i.e.: Twitter follower count] "

Interesting. Looks like Nova's moved on from T2.

I think Nova has contributed greatly, and will continue to do so. His gifting is not in finishing, but in starting - starters and finishers are seldom the same person. What is unusual here is that a starter is given large amounts of capital but the vc's don't know enough to pair him with a finisher. One of my business partners said a business needs a dreamer, a doer and a sob. To which I asked, so that makes you.....? T2 is based on what I know of it (unless they've come up with some scaling algorithm, which isn't a product, and should be sold based on the patent to MS or google) fails on differentiation, and is entering a market against formidable incumbents. Hence Nova's thoughts that the next 'google' needs to differentiate itself further are actually quite valid. If I were Nova's vc on T2 I would pull the plug. Never talk about your next project.

Not so long ago, in fact just a couple years ago, Twine (T1) was far ahead of the competition in the area of interest networking (building of communities around interests). I think Nova and T1 really did a good job in *pioneering* the idea that social networking should not just focus on people connecting to each other but rather on the topics that people share an interest for. For some reasons, Twine did not try to stay ahead in this field and didn't integrate improvements that seemed quite obvious. I would have liked to see T1 evolve towards real semantic tagging, connecting Twine tags and topics to linked data entities. I would have liked to see a T1 with stronger collaborative filtering: even the "like" button that was - i believe - introduced by FriendFeed, is now everywhere, except on Twine... I don't think that what Nova is discussing here has much to do with T2, just like I don't think that the semtweet project that he tweeted about a couple weeks ago has much to do with T2 either. I agree that so far Nova has been a dreamer, an inventor, more than a "doer", but I still like to check what he is dreaming about. Sometimes his dreams seem very deep and interesting: I don't find the current T2 dream (faceted search based on Apache-Solr technology) very exciting, unless something big comes out of it with respect to RDF. I am not that excited either about Semtweet, unless again it brings along something big with respect to RDF. And now Nova is sharing some new thoughts about some new user-machine interaction that wouldn't be based on search but on something else... I agree it's still pretty vague and not very convincing yet...

This is an interesting book on game theory and cooperation, by Len Fisher. 2008