- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Rip Saw
The thing is, it probably wouldn't serve as a way to quantiry someone's merit. I'm guessing it would serve as a guidline.
I still think there's no way he can pull off a system with little to no human interaction that works. It's almost impossible to quantify someone's merit based on physical factors. Of course, I'm still not entirely clear as to what the system is to accomplish.
The karma system would probably have little to no effect on us. I really have not a clue what it will be like other than the fact that I read Achronos' post on the subject. I invision it as a way the bungie.net online team and maybe moderators can judge a person. Let's face it - there are a lot of people here, and there are a lot of people contributing positively and negatively. Getting to know and recognize individuals here is hard. The karma system would give them a general idea of what kind of member you are. And maybe the karma system would be tied in someway to the full white board of things the bungie.net online team can give us as rewards. I doubt that it would do this automatically though. For someone to get a prize, they should probably be a good enough member to be recognized without a number tied to their name.
That's just how I see it might work based on the information given to us.
The other side of this of course, is that anyone who is able to give karma "points" to people would obviously be judging them positively, and it does have a direct corelation to your merit as a member of the site. I can't remember, but I think that whether this system is handled by someone giving us points, or if it's automatic.
The negative or downside of having it being personnaly done by special or high ranking users is that if a user (probably online team) finds something that would merit karma, they would be obligated to give them points. And if they ever missed, or didn't see something that would deserve karma - the system is flawed.
So how do you fix that problem? Well you could make it very hard to get karma, and that way they don't have such a stress, but isn't that what the online team does now, mentally? If someone is an awesome member and can be trusted, they become a moderator. But that member has to catch the attention of the online team.
The second way to solving the problem of a personally-given-karma system is to extend the abilities to give karma to more members (maybe moderators?) But of course, that brings up another problem. Individually different people will judge a member differently, or give out disproportional amounts of karma in comparison to the other moderators.
So now, lets take a look at an automatic system. The main problem with this, is that programs are bugged, and faulty sometimes. Imagine the a government official hiring a computer as an advisor...sort of whacky. Maybe that isn't the best analogy, but in anycase, the automatic system - however it would work - would give less of a strict merit number, and more of a guideline. It just wouldn't feel like it could be trusted completely.
Now that we're down here at the bottom of my post, I totally forgot where this started. Hm...Forget "Well thought out post"
The bottom line is - lets wait and see what the online team says.
[Edited on 9/28/2005]