LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration [LWN.net]

LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration

Posted Aug 25, 2011 7:36 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration by dlang
Parent article: LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration

This can be seen as a feature. The amount of topics I'm interested in is much larger than my ability to contribute something even slightly useful.
And dealing with my well intended but often misguided contributions can be a waste of everybody's time.
Anyway, I'm sure that, like with many things, there's no single good way to deal with this. Karma-like could be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff when the community is already built up. When you're starting, when you can deal with "useless" contributions in a economical way, or when you simply cannot afford the bad PR of disgruntled attention seekers, other options have to be considered.

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LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration

Posted Aug 25, 2011 11:03 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]

> Sites could let you "import" karma from other sites they recognise. An expert in one area who abuses that to waste people's time as a "newby" elsewhere could be duly penalised at source.

Karma systems are a benchmark system, and like any benchmark they can be gamed and the more elaborate a benchmark is and the more fair it pretends to be, the easier it is to game and the trickier to detect.

LinuxCon: Clay Shirky on collaboration

Posted Aug 25, 2011 18:38 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

I've often thought there ought to be a way to do federated karma, but no scheme I've been able to imagine would be able to withstand abuse well enough to provide any benefit.

karma-based discussion/collaboration sites

Posted Aug 28, 2011 1:39 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I don't see that the sites assume a person has effectively unlimited time to build up karma. What I see is that they aren't interested in the participation of a person who doesn't.

And "unlimited" is an exaggeration, isn't it? Isn't the actual amount of time quite bounded and even predictable?

Computer networks used to be full of communities like that. I used to read and contribute to several forums every day. I knew most of the participants and we discussed things I was interested in. I had to stop when the Net got too big and all of them turned into help desks. I can understand people trying to set up such a community again, at the expense of the occasional quality contributor who just drops in.

karma-based discussion/collaboration sites

Posted Aug 28, 2011 12:31 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the time needed to earn karma may be bounded on one system, but across multiple systems it's not.

in part it depends on the karma system

one system I know of won't let you post anything in the dev section until you have posted enough messages outside of that section.

people can post stupid messages to reach the count, or they can wait an unknown amount of time until they have good useful messages to post. how long is this going to take?

requiring that people build up karma eliminates 'drive by' assistance from experts along with 'silly questions' from newbies. If you are doing kernel development (especially reverse engineering odd hardware), wouldn't you just love to get a comment from Linus? A Karma system will prevent this, and I guarantee you that your walled sandbox is not important enough for him to jump through hoops to participate in.

one of the criticisms of contributer agreements is that they raise the bar to contributers by making the process of submitting a quick patch hard. Karma systems do the same thing to block contributions.

karma-based discussion/collaboration sites

Posted Aug 28, 2011 19:23 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I agree with all that, but I don't think the folks who invent and deploy karma systems make any false assumptions. I think they make a conscious tradeoff.

Just like when people have spam prevention systems that make it difficult or impossible for some people to send them email. Or unlisted telephone numbers.

karma-based discussion/collaboration sites

Posted Aug 28, 2011 23:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

or requiring contributer agreements for patches.

or requiring copyright assignment for patches.

why is it these last two get people up in arms, while these other limits to contributions are shrugged off as not mattering?

karma-based discussion/collaboration sites

Posted Sep 29, 2011 21:56 UTC (Thu) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]

Because with patches, you have already limited the set to those that can write patches.

Regular forums on the other hand need to filter out many more people since the bar otherwise is only the ability to enter text into a computer.