Replacing karma with upvotes

upvote if youre reading this in 2013!!!!!! No i prefer ns the way it is; not youtube comments

I like karma better, it is more unique

so now we can uprate individual posts? I don't get it

Probably what is going to happen is a large overhaul of the Karma system. The Karma system was designed a long time ago and NS was very different in the way it functioned back then. So I think that there's a lot of merit to adjust it to take into account the new systems we have.

I commented on in the post upvote thread with an idea like this. Have something like a daily upvote or downvote for a member, then at 12:00 eastern or whatever the upvote/downvote count is recorded and calculated to generate a rating on a scale of 1-10. With this then you can reward members when they help you instead of going "got yoo @ 10/10 d00d." And vise versa for down voting. As long as we could keep members on a 1-10 basis though, I like to know where I lay on that scale.

There's merit to this idea, and its something that we've been toying around with for some time.

We actually have a killer formula that gives us a 1-10 rating out of all the aggregate up/down votes you give something. So we could very easily calculate this, and we may just do that.

The other factor though is that Karma needs an overhaul. Its based off of a lot of philosophies of a drastically older Newschoolers and as such there are some things that we could tweak to help bring up the relevance.

could you imagine how slow NS would be at 12:00 eastern every day, calculating karma for thousands of members?

didnt you do a big change like last year though?

Closer to like 6 months ago...i think.

Already works like this. That is actually the best way to do it.

We always do changes, but I'm actually talking about totally rebuilding it.

Right now a great deal of your karma score comes from views on the content you create. Since there wasn't as much rating before, it was never designed to take into account what people thought of that intact able content.

The ever to member karma is the same. Right now the way it factors into the mix could be vastly improved by the new ratings data we have.

Yeah, like every other site has up/down votes.

The problem with integrating the comment rating with karma is that comments are often rated by people depending upon whether they agree or disagree, not whether or not the post is a good contribution.

On this point sir, I could not agree with you more.

Ideally the up/down voting system within the forums would be culturally accepted as a way to vote quality up and crappy down. So someone could make a point you disagree with, yet you give them an upvote because it was so eloquently stated.

I think that is a pipedream though to be honest with you, people get angry behind their keyboards and do stupid things. It is absolutely my intention for the voting system to be used this way and I encourage you to assist me in spreading the good word.

Now, in terms of linking it to Karma, it might actually take away some of the rage-karma changes. Right now, if someone pisses you off, you go in and change them from a 10/10 to a 1/10 - and that fluctuates the system like crazy. The member-to-member Karma is a multiple so it ends up making a huge difference when you skew the system with that much anger.

The way we calculate a 1-10 rating using up/down votes is actually much more accurate in aggregate. So you'd simply rate people's posts as you see them, and then overall we'd generate your 1-10 score against that member without your direct control over it.

So in the end, the wins we'd get from being able to use math against granular data outweigh the one-time rage issues of downrating posts. In actual fact, it actually helps beat it.