I’ve got quite a lot of Python-fu and sufficient web-fu, but not very much time. If there’s anything like consensus that some change to the voting/karma system would be beneficial, then I’ll see whether I can easily get the LW codebase running on my system, and have a go at doing the necessary implementation. But (1) I’d rather wait until there’s some evidence that it’s actually (a) a good idea and (b) seen to be a good idea by the Masters of the Codebase, and (2) if there are people in the LW community who’ve worked with Reddit stuff before then they’re likely to be better placed to improve things than me.
I have some modest Python skills, a forked and working copy of the LW codebase on my local machine, and the potential to block out some time to implement features.
The main things stopping me are existing time commitments for the next 1-2 weeks and a lack of consensus (from community and the Powers That Be) about how it ought to work. For instance, I’m not even sure which part(s) of gjm’s post you’re referring to with “do this”. I’d love to help but I don’t want to spend time implementing things that noone wants.
Well, we’ve got a pretty wide consensus that upvoting your own comments should not increase your karma. At least it looks like a wide consensus to me, based on admittedly biased and small sampling data. With any luck this is simple—with any unluck it’s not.
upvoting your own comments should not increase your karma
One problem with fixing this is that a quick hack to remove the karma from a self-upvote might break if/when self-upvoting is removed entirely. Of course, this might be avoided merely by the relevant programmer bearing this possibility in mind.
I wonder—would it be useful for people to receive karma points for programming contributions to the LW community? It sounds reasonable to me.
An interesting question is, how do you determine the number of karma points the work deserves? One approach would be that one of the site admins could assign it a value. Another would be that it could be voted upon.
Essentially the description of the ‘feature’ to be added would be a post, and it’s score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it. Vote up if you think that score is too little, vote down if you think it is too much. This would also give you a way to rank the ‘feature requests’ - those with the highest scores are the ones the community cares about most (of course that may not matter much if there’s only the occasional bit of programming work to be done).
I realise that there’d be costs and effort required to get any system like this going. E.g. you probably want such feature request ‘posts’ on a different part of the site, and you’d have to explain the scheme to people, etc.
This idea of providing karma points like this wouldn’t have to apply to just programming tasks—it could be anything else that isn’t a post or a comment but which is nonetheless a contribution to the community.
Right now we don’t have the programming resources to do this. Tricycle is currently working on other parts of the system. Python volunteer anyone?
I’ve got quite a lot of Python-fu and sufficient web-fu, but not very much time. If there’s anything like consensus that some change to the voting/karma system would be beneficial, then I’ll see whether I can easily get the LW codebase running on my system, and have a go at doing the necessary implementation. But (1) I’d rather wait until there’s some evidence that it’s actually (a) a good idea and (b) seen to be a good idea by the Masters of the Codebase, and (2) if there are people in the LW community who’ve worked with Reddit stuff before then they’re likely to be better placed to improve things than me.
I have some modest Python skills, a forked and working copy of the LW codebase on my local machine, and the potential to block out some time to implement features.
The main things stopping me are existing time commitments for the next 1-2 weeks and a lack of consensus (from community and the Powers That Be) about how it ought to work. For instance, I’m not even sure which part(s) of gjm’s post you’re referring to with “do this”. I’d love to help but I don’t want to spend time implementing things that noone wants.
Well, we’ve got a pretty wide consensus that upvoting your own comments should not increase your karma. At least it looks like a wide consensus to me, based on admittedly biased and small sampling data. With any luck this is simple—with any unluck it’s not.
One problem with fixing this is that a quick hack to remove the karma from a self-upvote might break if/when self-upvoting is removed entirely. Of course, this might be avoided merely by the relevant programmer bearing this possibility in mind.
I wonder—would it be useful for people to receive karma points for programming contributions to the LW community? It sounds reasonable to me.
An interesting question is, how do you determine the number of karma points the work deserves? One approach would be that one of the site admins could assign it a value. Another would be that it could be voted upon.
Essentially the description of the ‘feature’ to be added would be a post, and it’s score would be the number of karma points to be awarded for implementing it. Vote up if you think that score is too little, vote down if you think it is too much. This would also give you a way to rank the ‘feature requests’ - those with the highest scores are the ones the community cares about most (of course that may not matter much if there’s only the occasional bit of programming work to be done).
I realise that there’d be costs and effort required to get any system like this going. E.g. you probably want such feature request ‘posts’ on a different part of the site, and you’d have to explain the scheme to people, etc.
This idea of providing karma points like this wouldn’t have to apply to just programming tasks—it could be anything else that isn’t a post or a comment but which is nonetheless a contribution to the community.
upon reflection, a poll might be better. along the lines of:
how many points is the implementation of this feature worth?
10
20
50
100
150