This NWN post on Second Life's jerkwad-infested, unwelcome Welcome Areas a couple weeks ago inspired a lot of conversation, and inspires me to raise a point I've been making for some time: Second Life needs a user-to-user karma rating system, because it's the best and maybe only way to foster community and increase engagement while minimizing the influence of bad actors.
If you're not sure what that means, check out the karma system used on Reddit, and watch how it works: Basically, users can upvote each other's post submissions and comments. Those which get the most upvotes rise to the top and are the most prominently displayed; those which get too many downvotes sink to the bottom, and usually disappear from view. In an SL karma system, sim access could be set according to user karmic level, so that SLers with highly negative karma would be barred from even going into the Welcome Areas.
Now if you're an SL oldbie, you'll know that Second Life long ago did have a karma system, but it was horribly abused. In fact, in The Making of Second Life, I devoted a whole chapter to how badly implemented it was. (For example, SLers would hold "rate parties" where they'd bestow each other Plus votes for no reason in particular.) However, that doesn't mean karma systems in general are bad -- as any user of Reddit (or for that matter, Slashdot and any number of other virtual communities) knows, they do basically work. Reddit's system helps make awesome acts of community like this possible.
So how do you create a karmic system that can't easily be gamed, or lend itself to abuse? Here's some simple design mechanics:
- Karma points should be anonymously bestowed. That way, you don't know who gave you a positive or negative karma point, which would only inspire drama -- or about as bad, feeling an obligation to reciprocate.
- Karma points should be bestowed after a random time delay. This will also mask who gave karma points to whom.
- The ability to bestow karma should be dependent on the user's own karma level, and the frequency of karma points they bestow. This is to prevent "karma wars", in which bad actors ban together to negatively rate others out of revenge or just sadistic fun. Cap the number of karma points any one user can give out per month, and prevent users with negative karma from giving out any karmic points at all, and the karma wars problem is more or less solved.
- Keep the karma algorithm secret and frequently tweaked. This is probably the most important function of a good karma system -- to prevent it from being gamed, users should never precisely know how or when points are given or taken away.
With those limitations (and maybe a few more) in place, I'm fairly sure a karma system would more or less work in SL. It would also have the advantage of creating a quasi-game structure in SL without being an actual game. But the object of the karma game, so to speak, is to be a friendly, fun, creative, and helpful person. (Again, see Reddit.) Of course, people will still try to game the system, and that's inevitable. But even then, like Winston Churchill might have said if he made MMOs, a karma system is the worst possible solution -- except for all the others.
Um, didn't we USED to have a reputation system? And wasn't it tossed out because it was child's play for organized bands of jerks to boost each other's reputations?
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:27 PM
quoting directly from the article, shockwave:
"Now if you're an SL oldbie, you'll know that Second Life long ago did have a karma system, but it was horribly abused. In fact, in The Making of Second Life, I devoted a whole chapter to how badly implemented it was."
Posted by: Eleri Ethaniel | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:34 PM
"This time it's different." Yeah, right.
Posted by: Maggie Darwin (@MaggieL) | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:38 PM
- ... terrible. NO. I needs not! SL is NO game.
I dont want any positive point / karma.
I am helpful and friendly. But I do NOT want to do so, for "karmapoints".
Everything about me you can read in my inworld - profile. And I am not anonymous in SL.
My SIM ist "mature".
Nothing else is needed to know, or to do.
LL: make SIMs cheaper for uncommercial artists and for charity projects! THIS is needed.
Greets
BukTom Bloch (SL)
aka
Burkhard Tomm-Bub, M.A. (RL)
Posted by: BukTom Bloch aka Burkhard Tomm-Bub, M.A. | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:41 PM
Considering that I am a hermit most of the time in SL, socializing with only a few people, this would put me in a position of not "earning" Karma and then being denied access to certain locations? No thanks.
(not to mention that there is no way to prevent abuse of this system)
Posted by: ely | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:42 PM
Write down "SL is not social media" 1,000 times and call me in the morning.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:45 PM
Or maybe SL's experience is just an indicator that Reddit is not as proof of good as people want to believe it is.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:51 PM
Certainly topics there can easily get pushed up for no logical reason, or pushed down for even less logic.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:54 PM
Hiding the method just means you can pretend to work while still having deeply flawed results. It just ensures nobody can see the mess.
Its like sweeping a dead cat under the sofa and then saying your house is clean. You've still got a dead cat in the living room... its just hidden.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:55 PM
This is a terrible idea. This gives people that use SL even more reason to judge other users and ruin their SL experience. We do not need this.
Posted by: Stevie Muggins | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:57 PM
Sorry for all the posts
Something in this sentence is filtered: but I had to post each sentence one at a time to find which one was being rejected:
I t do es no t en sure it works
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 02:57 PM
This is a terrible idea. Very good people would be horribly downvoted.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 03:01 PM
This could easily be used to punish people for activities outside of SL. You don't like gays, Texans, ballet dancers, blondes... you name it, you can score them with bad karma. Remember Ban Link? A few people where added to the list due to personal grudges and pure spite. Oh, let's not forget Prokofy. He made some very unfavorable comments about Grace McDunnough in his blog and wound up being banned from a music venue because the owners were offended by those comments. This can happen to anyone who blogs or participates in social media.
No Thanks. A bad idea.
Posted by: GoSpeed Racer | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 03:11 PM
Make it only available for premium members. People who have paid accounts would actually care, or not.
Posted by: justtwocents | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 03:19 PM
I've thought about it for a couple of hours now. And none of your proposed solutions fixes anything.
- anonymous points; if I'm organizing a rating party, I don't care who boosts my rating.
- secret algorithm; again, as long as me and my buddies can boost each other, we don't care what's under the hood.
- time delay; why should anyone gaming the system care?
Even if you had a system where you could only give out one attaboy a day, launching 100 alts and giving one person 100 attaboys a day would be very simple to pull off.
And a good number of honest folks and builders who are most of the time in their own little corners and not bothering anyone get labeled as undesirables when they do look around, because they have zip for "karma" points.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 03:23 PM
You know, you give me pause to think. Suppose we are going about this the wrong way.
Suppose everyone everywhere is able to "slap" a person no more than 3 times a day? And the person must actually be in front of you to slap them, making most griefing uses of it limited. A troll in a music venue would be slapped repeatedly by many people whereas someone not bothering anyone ever would have no slaps at all.
This would eliminate the parties, since slaps are negative and not positive. Who'd go round and round with friends giving themselves more negative scores? You only cheat for something you want, not for something you don't want.
Make the slap score public in the profile -- no exceptions. While certainly some griefing would be possible with an organized group, they'd get slapped back the same amount if not more. And a person can only slap 3 times a day. Perhaps make it where you have to have accumulated 15+ hours of actual active usage before you can even slap to begin with -- that would make alts worthless for griefing with slaps.
Consider possibly making the karma a negative thing instead of a positive one. It seems to solve a number of the drawbacks.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 03:30 PM
Curbing misconduct on Reddit requires a staff of moderators to deal with troublemakers. If the Second Life Welcome Areas are terrible, then the solution is getting staff there with eject and ban privileges. Or just do away with them.
A karma system for Second Life would be pointless. As pointless as a karma system for Facebook would be. There's no 1 core activity like link submissions or answering questions to build a karma system around.
Posted by: Ezra | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 04:49 PM
And why don't bring a Wanking meter too, Wank... erm Wagner?
Posted by: TooMany5vs1 | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 05:15 PM
positive/negative, I don't care. It's a bad idea both ways. I personally refuse to have myself judged by people with much less frontal lobe activity or moral integrity.
I guess in the long run most of us would end up with a 50/50 account of attaboys and slaps anyway, doesn't matter if you have 3 of each or 300.
I love Grace McDunnough (like everybody else) and hate Proky (like everybody else) but I'd do nothing to give him/her any bad kharma points just because I find his political agenda and his discussion strategy and wording repelling. But I'd give "slaps" to the owners of said music venue eventhough they are probably on my side.
Not everybody is able to think that far out of the box, so why should I give them permission to give me love and hate points?
Posted by: Orca Flotta | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 05:42 PM
To quote Jim Moriarty:
Aren't ordinary people just adorable?
Posted by: Orca Flotta | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 05:44 PM
Terrible idea. The Karma system is one of the primary flaws of Reddit, IMO.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 06:08 PM
We just need some sort of respect or trust system so that you can be a bit smarter about who you are interacting and doing business with. Especially since Linden Lab does not get involved in business disputes between residents.
Posted by: Metacam Oh | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 06:33 PM
Way back in 2008 I had some ideas for the Noob User Experience that through some outrageous oversight weren't adopted officially. I know, I'm still scratching my head.
Read on!
Noob Trees
Maybe noobs should start out very small - smaller than Tinies - and grow bigger every day.
Like noobseeds turning into noobsprouts.
Maybe noobs could first spawn as fruits of a noob tree, and ripen in a few minutes. Then they'd drop to the ground, but still be very small and undefined. Over the course of a day or two they'd gain abilities - at first they'd just roll around and have no inventory. Once they had been inworld for a few hours they'd have an inventory and be bigger - they'd be able to move faster but still wouldn't be able to affect grown residents much.
Grown residents would gain by helping nooblets, as measured by the nooblets choosing to give them rating points (one per nooblet). Each rating point would count towards a rl trinket, like, say, an SL keychain for 5,000 points. Negative ratings would be added together, too, and anyone with a negative noob rating balance would be automatically muted for all noobs. After a certain amount of time inworld the noobs would be "done" and be able to do anything.
Pre-Muting
Some people should just be pre-muted universally.
Pneumatic Tubes
There could be room with many doors (or a sign up questionaire or a set of pneumatic tubes):
"I've always wanted to be a (pick one) A. Hobo, B. Neko, C. Robot, D. Muscle-bound pinhead, E. Top-heavy trollop, F. Company employee, G. Vampire, H. Business owner, I. Artist, J. DJ, K. Teacher, L. Explorer." (or whatever)
The person chooses one and is whisked away to a relevent area, or conversely, enters the chamber like the man in The Fly, and is transformed into whatever has been chosen.
I do like the idea of getting into a kind of pneumatic tube affair and zooming off to the destination of your dreams.
Dispersing Noobs
AVATAR CANNON FTW!!11!! Shoot noobs out of a cannon that will send them to random places on the grid. Or have a spaceship they get into that is directed by their answers to a few simple questions, then lands somewhere and unsits them.
Posted by: Osprey | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 06:48 PM
Need moar fun kthnxbai
Posted by: Osprey | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 06:50 PM
Er ... uh ... ah ...
NO.
Posted by: M.A.DeLuca | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 07:04 PM
/me down votes this idea
Posted by: Marianne McCann | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 07:15 PM
if this is aimed at "unwelcome" areas then you talking about a whole 100 people out of 40,000 at any one time. and on linden welcome areas then you talking about like only 6 of them where those 100 people actual go all day every day
reditting everyone in the world just to deal with this is a bit overkill i think
Posted by: elizabeth (16) | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 08:53 PM
At elizabeth(16) Welcome areas are on mainland. Max 40 avatars per region. So a 4 sim set would be up to 120.
@Hamlet: The welcome area trolls would gleefully gang negative rate new accounts to boot them out. What is needed is LL cough up the cash for welcome area monitoring and deal with the offenders. Private estate owners can easily script a clique board to accomplish your idea and make sure only the snottiest snobberies stay at a venue. (Or they could just make it group only and have mods to eject undesirables from the group) Also LL could simply disable scripts and voice in the welcome area regions. End of problem.
@everyone: The more you avoid welcome areas and sandboxes the less you are bothered by this. Heck I seldom see anyone on mainland at all anymore except some obvious bots.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 09:23 PM
I think its a great idea! So long as the people denied access to places have to have a pretty bad rating, that would help alot with welcome area's! And why not give everyone incentive to socialise, if you dont want to climb down from your playground in the sky im sure an avg social rating wont bother you any. Giving residents a tool for trolls without making the tool trollable is all good in my book, I vote hamlet to code and impliment it!
Posted by: robsterrawb jaxxon | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 09:50 PM
errr thats 160 per wa. but mainland regions die with over 20 avis so LL needs to cut those numbers in wa regions down to 20 per. Maybe 10 per. Just so the pranksters won't be able to congregate in force anywhere in any wa.
Posted by: Ann Otoole InSL | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 10:23 PM
this would be a disaster
Posted by: fluff | Wednesday, April 04, 2012 at 11:55 PM
Crowdsourced banning? Second Life had it before. It was called Red Zone.
The lesson that Red Zone taught us is that the majority isn't always right. Or smart.
Posted by: Masami Kuramoto | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 12:51 AM
The basic idea is ok, but it just won't work like this.
People will abuse it.
I run a sim, I've run one for about 3 years and during that time I have banned and ejected many people.
I did this for the right reasons, they broke rules, were griefers, etc.
But these people could all give me the "thumbs down" and that might harm my reputation.
But what might be interesting is showing from how many sims someone has been banned...
After all, most normal, well behaved people may get banned from a few sims because of the owner being mean, a misunderstanding etc.
But if you get banned from a LOT of sims?
What could the reasons be for that?
Generally it would mean you're a jerk.
Maybe they could add a little red dot to someones profile if they have banned from more then 10 sims, or 20, or whatever is more then common or generally acceptable.
When I ban someone, I have a good reason.
If this person is polite, understanding and reasonable, I will unban them.
So by being a decent person you can even get some of your bans removed.
And when someone who has been banned from 50 sims wants to come to mine, I'll be watching, or may not even let them in.
Abusing this system would not be very easy.
You'd need a sim to start with, you need several sims to really push up someones bad score.
Sure, there will always be some sim owners who are jerks and who will give you bans even if you don't deserve them.
So lets not put these bans on peoples profiles until they get up to a certain amount.
Maybe getting a huge amount of bans may even alarm the LL's to check up with what on earth you're doing.
I think that this may also keep people from misbehaving in the future.
Being banned will mean something.
Until... of course you just get an alt.
But either way, being banned may eventually influence your access to other sims.
Would you allow someone with 50 bans?
Posted by: Jo yardley | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 01:24 AM
i have 300 satisfied customers and 1 unsatisfied = -1 karma (unless i do stupid "dear customer if you like my product vote for me")
multiply this with 365 days = -87 karma = my sales start to drop because i have a bad rating.
46032 satisfied customers and -87 karma
how can this be prevented in your "gaming"system?
Posted by: Roger | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 04:10 AM
and btw we already have a rating system on the marketplace. its not anonymous so one really has to have a good reason to give a good or bad rating. and everyone can see who and what reason they gave for a good or bad rating. so we can see if the reason is valid or not, like my fav "1 star - the product was not delivered" = noob who has no clue how marketplace works and that failed delivery is LL fault and not the creators fault.
this system totally contradicts your suggestions, and it works damn well.
Posted by: Roger | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 04:24 AM
I think it's a bad idea because it would be gamed just like the old ratings system. If it's to deal with the problem of the UnWelcome Areas, then LL boots on the ground is the answer. But the means paid staff dedicated to the task, something which LL seems averse to.
Posted by: Alazarin | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 05:58 AM
1. Sign up to Second Life, get noob karma.
2. Troll the welcome areas until you get booted.
3. Go to 1.
On the plus side, new sign-ups will go through the roof?
Posted by: Mouski | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 06:39 AM
Do you remember The Sims Online?
The Sims Online (TSO) was going to be the hottest virtual world release since Homer penned the Illiad. Why wouldn't it be? The Sims and its expansions consistantly topped the game sales charts. There was a huge built-in fan base.
But TSO stumbled out of the gate, faltered and faded, and limped towards an inglorious cancellation after the ultimate humiliation of being relabled EA World.
There were many reasons why this happened, but one of the biggest factors was the reputation system. The rep system powered the emergence of TSO "mafias", groups of players that blackmailed others with the threat of destroying their reputation.
The TSO developers saw this as interesting emergent gameplay -- they didn't realize the sheer scale with which the "mafias" were driving people away until it was far too late. One malicious griefer with an axe to grind can cost you hundreds of accounts if left unchecked. An organized cabal of them can destroy your player base and blacken the reputation of the game beyond any hope of redemption (hence TSO's lame name change).
Some of the best and brightest minds in virtual world design have tried to implement reputation systems. At the very best, they were gamed into irrelevance. At worst, they became a heavy blunt object for griefers seeking the ultimate payoff: taking the whole world down.
The reason that rating systems for social media are somewhat less subject to abuse is that for the most part, social media are too damn boring for the contemporary griefers. Only a small subset have the necessary brainpower to cope with walls of text... most of them can't even spell a full word or formulate a complete sentence. They're post-literate, and by that I mean they're roughly as literate as a post.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 06:51 AM
I celebrated the day the old silly rating system went away and I don't see any reason for why the mistake should be repeated and a rating system be brought back one way or another.
There have been many points as to why it would be mistake been made in the comments above but I guess I would still like to add that it would most likely jsut end like the one that has been there before ... those who do lots of good for their freinds and the community, the builders who enjoy building nice things, the freindly people you meet at unlikely places .. will never get anything while people who does not deserve any good karma will go out of their way to game the system and take pride in the high number of votes they will manage to gather.
And everyone else will live in fear of the randim greifer who will give people negative ratings for LoLz or because they don't like their avi .. and every honest RP admin, club host, sim greeter or sim owner will find their SL live to be turned into hell by all those people who have been kicked for greifing, rule breaking and abusive behaviour and who will make it a point of giving everyone invovled the same negative rating ...
I guess the only way someone could think that a rating system will work is by not having ever spend any moment of time in one of the above mentioned jobs or in any similar position.
Posted by: Rin Tae | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 07:23 AM
I agree that LL boots on the ground OR a posse of volunteers assigned the powers of kicking in welcome areas by LL, is the correct answer. But there's naught wrong with also examining an algorithmic approach that could eliminate that, because lets be frank, LL is never going to do it the right way. So thinking about the least damaging wrong way would be in keeping with the Taulet Paper of Linden approach.
An idea that came to me last night -- set things up so in addition to being limited to giving out only 3 slaps per 24 hour period, you can burn those slaps to reject other people's slaps. So if you have a griefer hassling you and slapping you, you can use your own slaps to eliminate the ones he just gave. After 10 minutes, the slap is permanent. And every week you don't get slapped, one slap is subtracted from the count. Again, you have to touch the person to do the slapping -- no long distance or IM slaps. And thus griefers would lose their teeth -- there are going to be more people around to slap back and cancel his slaps than he has slaps to go around. And builders and people hanging out on their own parcels won't care, since the counter decrements when they don't get a unremoved slap on the account.
It would be nice if people could just all get along. But we have to consider the criminal and gangsta elements when building any world, be it SL or a D&D campaign. I'm not sure I care one way or the other about a reputation system, as I didn't care about the oldbie version either. But as long as it's not permitted to automate ejection from sims or blocking of people but is simply viewable in the profile, I'm not closed to the idea.
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 07:23 AM
@ shockwave yareach
I was always taught one awe$hit wipes out a thousand attaboys
Posted by: yoshiko Fazuku | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 07:29 AM
@Yoshiko -- Fortunately you and I have graduated out of that kindergarten and rejoined the real world :)
Posted by: shockwave yareach | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 07:45 AM
No, even you get voted down on reddit so you're either stupid or not looking at what 'rankings' you receive and are just suggesting something with no real brain behind it or do know the truth and are just suggesting it to cause problems to get some more traffic.
I will never support a ranking system ever! and I'll fight to make sure rodvik and Linden Lab never introduce once, as it will only get griefed by resident groups like the JLU who want to punish residents who've done nothing or have spoken out against them or just don't act like sterile barbies doing photo shoots all day. And after what some of those so called 'self proclaimed upstanding citizens' have said surely this would be a disaster not least between normal resident to resident disputes but as the JLU have stated anyone who's creative and playful inSL could be slapped with a false ban if that group decided they don't like the look of you and or your art or of what you're doing by group assaulting you with ar's, and now you want us to be group assaulted with a ranking system? you complete fool have you not learned anything about second life's past?
After suggesting this and not even remembering the uproar redzone and other types of resident made rankings systems for various purposes those I mention being based on IP/alleged viewer use and suggesting your a 'bad person' most often having your name added due to speaking out against these systems, you should probably do us all a favor and stop blogging.
But at least I understand why they fired you and why it's New World Notes, as you've not got the brain capacity to do anything or say anything that is based on history as you just seem to live in the moment of one braincell and that's likely not what Linden Lab needed in an employee no matter what other residents proclaim about them.
Posted by: Bunjie | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 07:54 AM
Second Life Needs a User-to-User Karma System Like....a fish needs an ashtray
Posted by: sirhc desantis | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 08:04 AM
Karma points is almost as good an idea as Osprey's Noob Tree. The ideas can be merged into a Karma Tree. Not sure how that would work but doesn't matter since it'd be gamed too.
Posted by: Amanda Dallin | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 08:59 AM
Ezra: "Curbing misconduct on Reddit requires a staff of moderators to deal with troublemakers."
Orca: "I personally refuse to have myself judged by people with much less frontal lobe activity or moral integrity."
Metacam: "We just need some sort of respect or trust system so that you can be a bit smarter about who you are interacting and doing business with."
I think these three illuminate the fundamental flaws in any system like this - and why I doubt it really works on Reddit.
What will the moderators curb really? Just certain forms of obvious misconduct. But that will nothing to address bias or differing perspectives. And grossly unfair moderation based on where the moderator's personal loyalties stand is very common (the core of why I no longer participate in some certain SL third-party forums).
Again they just work to hide the ball - and to make it appear as if the problem is under control.
Any such system becomes one about cliques, and if not in the in crowd, can get very harsh.
Orca's comment triggered my thoughts because who has moral integrity is very dependent on who gets to answer that question. And I suspect we would have very strong disagreements over that. A system like this would end up being used to allow different camps of worldviews to just down-vote each other in never ending spirals of hostility; while propping up their own hate-mongers.
Metacam's comment illustrates the real danger: that such a horribly flawed system becomes trusted - when in fact it is a lot more biased and abusive than simply no system.
This is another one of those 'techies not getting it' things. You can't solve a social problem with 1s and 0s. A rating system is just throwing a 'gamification mechanic' at popularity and trust. Popularity and trust are best handled by having people build up reputations over time. Not with points and scores.
Its a flawed premise to ever assume you can trust a 97 more than a 73... meaningless numbers; applied to a social dynamic, produce wrongful and harmful results.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 09:14 AM
Turned my thoughts on this into a blog post:
http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/karma-point-like-popularity-systems-flawed-in-the-inception-an-example-of-techies-not-getting-it-with-social-dynamics/
In case the trackback thing fails. It always seems to fail when I try to use it... O.o
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 09:37 AM
In SL my avatar has a name, my join date, and my UUID. Anything else tied to my account is my choosing alone. A rating system violates that and I do not approve.
Posted by: Adeon Writer | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 10:04 AM
I think this might be able to work if there was the ability to opt in or out of it, so users who didn't want to deal with karma points could easily say so and then not be bothered by it.
It would also be nice to have a control over how many people can give or take karma in a given period so mass griefings couldn't happen - say, you can only lose or gain ten karma total every day.
Posted by: Arwyn Quandry | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 10:27 AM
I'm still not clear on how you would prevent a flash mob of jerkwads from sinking anybody they didn't like and engineering a complete takeover of a region?
Posted by: Stone Semyorka | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 10:33 AM
Really, really bad idea. Social media itself would lead to abuse of the system. Someone disagrees with someone else on Twitter or Plurk, and 500 people on that someone else's friends list is off to "slap" him or her. Really bad for content creators who are easy to find. They're usually on platforms right over their stores.
Posted by: Kat Alderson | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 10:43 AM
I would love to see in my profile, ratings about:
The amount of diff partners i had virtual sex during 24h!
About how my look is hot or not!
The amount of Linden donated!
and so on and so on!
Also make sure Karma will give special rights and access to special areas, where the common less karma avatars will not be allowed to be in.
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Above is a ironic thought, i hope all will understand, how i feel about some that will make an unnecessary, useless discrimination system!
Posted by: foneco zuzu | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 11:29 AM
Another great way to drive people farther away from enjoying SL... let's make a system where we can vote people down. LOL This is a horrible idea. Talk about a system the fosters bullying and griefing. No thank you!
Posted by: Jacks | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 11:34 AM
"I'm still not clear on how you would prevent a flash mob of jerkwads from sinking anybody they didn't like and engineering a complete takeover of a region?"
Because as I explained, ratings would be limited to people with good karma, so jerkwads wouldn't be able to give anyone bad karma.
"launching 100 alts and giving one person 100 attaboys a day would be very simple to pull off."
Easy enough fix: Prohibit karma giving to more than one alt.
"46032 satisfied customers and -87 karma
how can this be prevented in your 'gaming' system?"
That's another easy fix: Weight negative karma in relation to positive karma, so that people with overwhelmingly positive karma don't suffer from a few negs. Yelp's system for example works like this, so a restaurant with mostly 5 stars but a few 1 and 2 stars still maintains its high rating.
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 11:46 AM
Dont let the Mind Police Phuck you up
Posted by: jjccc coronet (@JJcccART) | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 03:25 PM
No whuffie system for me, thanks. I am not a gadget.
Posted by: Kim Anubis | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 05:31 PM
@anne - is about 100 people at any given period who deliberately go to WAs to gank newbies and pretty much anyone else on a semi-regular basis. when they not at the WAs then they doing it other places. if write a list of the names then can proof this number. the names change over the years but the number is pretty constant
+
there are also way heaps more people who play gestures, particles, animations and who woot the voice and open chat. is bedlam and noise at WAs often. lots of noise. people who cant handle noise and bedlam self-call it greifing and constantly call for controls to make all those noisey people be quiet. is kinda sad when they do this
the biggest users of gestures, particles, animations and wooting at WAs are newbies with less than 3 months inworld experience. can actual count that as well. they do it because is fun for them, and more importantly is part of the exploring process when they do this
can always tell the genuine newbies from the alts at WAs. the genuine newbies are the ones with poofers and gestures from 2004 that they found in a freebie dumpster
Posted by: elizabeth (16) | Thursday, April 05, 2012 at 08:38 PM
The Police blotter used to name people who had been given warnings or suspended, that would be a better system for checking people's reputations.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | Friday, April 06, 2012 at 03:34 AM
When you have nothing "invested", you have nothing to lose.Let's just make SL pay by the month and 1 account per email/payment/credit card.
Posted by: Connie Arida | Sunday, April 08, 2012 at 03:49 AM
We did have something like that in, uh, 2006? I forgot. It was called "rating". We even had "leader boards". It was so heavily gamed that LL got rid of that (even though the first generation of TPVs managed to extract that data from LL's servers and would still display it on people's profiles).
The idea was that everybody who got a lot of positive ratings every week would get an extra stipend (back then, everybody — even non-Premium users — got a few L$ every week from LL). Of course it was immediately gamed and, as such, worthless as a system.
I'm sure you remember that, Hamlet — we rated each other :)
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 02:46 PM
Gwyn, I referred to all that in this very post. It was gamed because it was poorly implemented, and it wasn't fixed because Linden Lab thought it wasn't needed any more.
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 02:57 PM
I think they basically assumed that "any system that can be gamed should be removed from SL and put into the hands of content creators". Anyone can create a karma system like you described using a HUD, for example.
Of course, then there is the question of making it known to be popular enough for a substantial amount of people, but that's not LL's concern...
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 03:20 AM