What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?
eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.
Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.
(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).
I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.
Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".
I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points.
Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.
Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.
You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like:
w = ln(k * m)
w = weight of vote
k = karma of voter
m = median points per comment by voter
Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).
Comments
What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?
eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.
Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.
(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).
I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.
Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".
Just an idea...
I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points.
Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.
Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.
You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like:
Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).