From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2003 - 22:54:17 MST
Charles Hixson wrote:
> spike66 wrote:
>
>> ...This notion is filled with interesting self referential
>> paradox, ya just gotta love it. {8-]
>>
>> What is karma? Who wrote it? spike
>
> The problem is that "karma" is an oversimplification...
OK I had an idea today. The current system allows one
to log into the archives and either applaud or smite
a particular post, at which time the karma counts the
numbers of each and assigns the result to the poster.
In the case of the extro archives it is pretty clear to
me that the database has been somehow corrupted or perhaps
hit by a repetitive smitebot, or a malicious sultan of smite
with enough time and patience to repeatedly open a post and
smite beyond recogition. Evidence: Greg Burch had only a
very few posts this calendar year, each of which I opened and
studied looking for any smitable content, yet there was none
that I could detect. Inappropriate smition still occurred,
and I am not just saying that because I failed to achieve
the height of smite, or even because I like the sound of
the term smite, as well as smiteth, and smitten, which is
what Bambi was with Fayleen, you will recall.
A random sampling shows that most posters actually have
negative karma, however when we were at Extros 4 and 5,
I do not recall seeing groups sitting around smiting each
other. Altho that does conjure entertaining mental imagery,
and may have been worth the cost of admission just to see it,
ours is not that kind of group. Quite the opposite, the
extropians appear to hold each other in quite high regard.
Idea: instead of a poster being smote, we set the buttons to
refer to the subject and the post. Instead of the violent
"smite" terminology, we use snore and pop, indicating popping
to attention at an exciting post, or snoring at subject which
one finds boring, stupid, unwell thought out, nonextropian,
etc. This might encourage those gentle souls who would never
smite another person to express their interest level, which
could be a far more valuable tool for increasing signal to
noise ratio on the extrolist. Then instead of a karma index,
the script would tally by subject line, the snore/pop ratio.
This technique would indicate what things extropians really
are interested in and what they like to talk about, without
running the risk of coercing anyone to modify their behavior.
We could continue to behave in accordance with Crocker's Rules.
I would far prefer an extrolist that is interesting to one
that is nice. Nice is for motorcycle lists.
Notice that the pop signal need not mean one *agrees* with
the post. If we have beaten a topic beyond recognition,
such as the gun thread, we could simply snore it to death.
Suggested symbols for snore =z, pop = !
Whuffie could even be estimated indirectly, by seeing who
originates the most snorey threads, vs who originates the
poppy topics. The potential for word play alone would make
it worth the effort. People who often post interesting but
negatively provocative topics would be popscalions. A
person who pops everything would be a popperdemalion, their
counterparts, stormin' snoremen. Those who hammer out
boring stuff, snoremiesters. Their posts would be
snorejerkers, but the extrocons would be waaay pop city.
spike
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