I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.
It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.
Simply making a bot to submit articles based on the home pages of some technical news web sites through screenscaping the external link URLs would be sufficient to increase the Karma score to unnatural numbers. So, some solution may be needed to stop this.
Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.
Comments
I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.
It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.
Simply making a bot to submit articles based on the home pages of some technical news web sites through screenscaping the external link URLs would be sufficient to increase the Karma score to unnatural numbers. So, some solution may be needed to stop this.
That's easily solved by divorcing submission karma from comment karma, which pg should do anyway.
That sounds more complicated that Google's page ranking system. That said, it sounds like fun to program.
Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.