From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Fri Mar 14 2003 - 08:11:06 MST
On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 02:30, hal@finney.org wrote:
> From: "Hal Finney" <hal@finney.org>
> X-Mailer: YaBB
>
>
> I like the idea of judging posts, although most threads have such a short
> lifetime that it might be more work than it is worth.
>
> One thing I just tried: I "applaud"ed Spike, and his positive score
> went up from 6 to 7. I then just tried it again, and the BBS interface
> game me a warning saying that I could not repeat an action within the
> wait time, and that the wait time was 6 hours!
>
> The implication is that one can repeatedly applaud or smite someone
> as long as you wait 6 hours between actions. These scores we are seeing
> may include multiple entries from a relatively small number of people
> who repeatedly applaud or smite certain targets. It's even conceivable
> that someone could write a script to automatically redo the action every
> six hours, giving somone 100 positive or negative points a month.
>
### It is quite likely that this indeed what happened, since the
distribution of the scores is so uneven. The majority of posters have
little or no karma, either good or bad, which reflects the baseline
random smitting/praise by readers, but some persons were selected for
special treatment (Lee, or me, which is understandable in view of our
combative style and sometimes strident assertions, and Spike, which is
totally baffling - who could hate Spike?).
One obvious solution is to give the reader an option to score a post
only once, although it would mean keeping a permanent record of the
votes (or would it? maybe the script could separately keep track of
voting and the total score - with more than a few voters it would be
impossible to find out the direction of the vote of any single person).
This brings me to the differing values of dark and white whuffie - votes
could be cast confidentially or openly, giving great opportunities to
the discerning sociologist for analyzing ostensible trends and the dark
undercurrents. Also, a finer gradation of the value of posts, as Spike
notes, would be useful - to tell the reader whether the post is boring,
smart, stupid, or the very paragon of wisdom and benevolence. A scale
with more points (very, mainly, somewhat, not at all) would help, too.
Finally, tracking the source of whuffie, whether coming from persons you
like or not (or persons generally liked or not) would allow every user
to attach subjective weights to the unfiltered measures.
Sounds like a major programming undertaking.
Rafal
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