We've launched some fairly big changes to the Karma system today, which are going to affect most people's Karma.
The first thing is that news is now an important factor of your Karma score. Creating it and making it good enough that people want to read it will gain Karma points. This will also factor in retro-actively for users who were active on their blogs over the years, so expect to see some pretty big jumps overall.
Second, we've re-factored how the data is stored so that we're able to break it down a bit more. We want to be able to give an idea of where people rank on the site in terms of the four main pillars of contributions you can make on NS.
The new Top Rated Karma page will have six default lists on it to start. Two lists take overall Karma score and split it between Industry and Regular members. The next four lists are for News, Videos, Photos and Conversations. The conversations you start, news articles you write, photos you shoot and videos you edit - and how many people deeply go over these - will rank you within each of those categories.
We don't expect perfection right off the bat, so if something is amiss don't panic and lets keep a reasonable conversation going about it. Over the winter we will seek to improve the rankings both overall, and of the people who create the content within our community.
All the official re-calculations launch at Midnight EST, so you can check it out now, but the data will not necessarily be accurate.
https://www.newschoolers.com/topkarma 