The Karma Experiment: Part 1

Hello everyone,

Three days from now marks six months since the addition of post voting, or in other terms, karma. It has been an interesting experiment for us to analyse how people respond to posts and interact with each other on the forum by giving approval or disapproval of something. We've seen very significant trends that lead us to the idea that this feature is not foolproof. When we developed it, we felt it was necessary to make it relaxed so that the community can adequately share their opinions and promote community through two little buttons.

Today we're announcing changes coming to the system and would like your feedback on the matter.

We made two changes today that were introduced to the live site:

• Votes will be hidden for the first thirty minutes of a post's existence. You can still vote on the post, though we will not be showing the result until 30 minutes after its initial post.
• Locked topics will no longer allow voting once the topic has been locked.

The following is a list of ideas we have regarding posts that will help alleviate issues:

• We're considering a new voting method that would consider how you vote towards the user or similar posts. This would mean if you're consistently downvoting or upvoting one user, we'll be less likely to include you in the final vote count. While we do think that some posts deserve downvotes, mass downvoting is childish and we do not approve of it.
• We're planning to add individual feature bans that will allow us to disable voting automatically if you're misusing it.
• We're planning on adding a karma leaderboard. We will be handling it in a way where the leaderboard will only update every few hours/everyday and will be using our automated systems to flush out people mass downvoting to move themselves up, or mass upvoting to move someone else up. This is already in the works. The reason we want to add leaderboards is to show who's active in this community and to promote users to give enriched content on our forum that is worthy of being pushed forward. We believe this can be accomplished.
• We're considering vote locking posts after a certain time. This is most notable when something changes within the community, such as a new feature being released, that makes an old topic/post redundant.

We do understand why people use these tools, to express their opinion towards someone's comments. Our data has shown that while most voting is legitimate and not used to do wrong, we do see some users are misusing the feature. We'll be monitoring this actively. Before I end this topic, we would also like to mention that we do not explicitly go out of our way to view vote data. When we're notified of trends, we will investigate to ensure that the community environment is kept friendly to all users. The trend we're noticing involves posts towards newer users who are not fully familiar with the community. In this situation, we hope our community realises that they're new here and to help.

We look forward to your feedback. We will have more news soon regarding our site and Donut Mod.

Sincerely,
Jake Andreøli and the Donut Team staff

Update: We're now running an A/B test. Some posts will no longer show a downvote button. We'll be analysing this data in a few weeks.

Such as this one apparently!

Edit: To clarify, these posts will not have their likes hidden for 30 minutes. So you can easily see if it says "0 likes" when you post if you are affected.

We've undone this as it seems most people were not a fan of this.

How about this one? (I'll find out in about 8 hours.)

I have a suggestion for this Karma feature. Could you also make so that you can see who is giving you Karma? For example you either click on the points on your post or you just highlight over the text and it will show you the people who rated your post up or down. This could be visible either for everyone's posts or only per own's account (example I can only see the ones who voted over my posts, not everyone else's posts). Of course it should be hidden for guests since there is no point in them seeing who voted who.

The reason why I'm suggesting this feature is that you should be able to identify the people who like and dislike you and those that abuse the reputation system (if there are people who abuse the system anyway).

There's two things I worry about regarding that:

• There's a chance someone will misuse it to harass users who downvoted them.
• There's a chance it will cause people to avoid the downvote button in fear of retaliation.

However I'll bring it up internally and we can discuss the option.

I got some feedback on the rating system.


It's just too simple to moderate. There isn't anything to base from other than patterns. Patterns alone aren't enough because you can't find a motive.
Just scrap ratings all together. A star system might be better, but it doesn't really work in a forum.

- Thomas

I think the new feature hiding upvotes and downvotes is personally a step in the wrong direction. The whole concept of having upvotes and downvotes is so that people can share their opinions, and sure people will misuse these features, but in all honesty this happens all the time in life. People can't be trusted, and if your solution to this is just punishing everyone, that's not fair on the majority of people who are using this feature how it is intended.

If I see a post I don't like/agree with and it has downvotes disabled, there is nothing I can do and my opinion will never be heard. So in this case, if I want my opinion shared, I need to end up writing an essay of a message (Because apparently I can't do anything but essays) which really wouldn't have been necessary had the downvotes just been enabled on the post. In this case I disagree with Jake's post announcing this feature, and because of pure luck I can't do anything about it. I'm sure this won't be the only time it happens either, and I can't be the only person having issues with this.

So, is there a clear solution to this? Of course there isn't. This is a problem experienced by communities everywhere, and even in real life to some extent. There will never be a fix for this. And this just seems like the wrong way to go about things.


I hope you're not sick of seeing my posts, I know I like to ramble a lot. Sorry!

The feedback we're receiving is extremely helpful. We're looking to create an environment where you can voice your opinion without people consistently feeling like they're being put down. This is our main goal. We are a community of gamers from all ages, all places and all backgrounds. Our goal is to include everyone, even if some people dont quite fit into some of the cliques. This is a big problem to us and it stems from our experiences in the past and trying to prevent bullying. This wasnt some random thing, we noticed certain users explicitly downvote bombing users almost as soon as they posted. So we're doing tests to see what works best.

We'll continue to listen to what people have to say, the more feedback we get, the quicker we can make the right decisions for our community.

The whole point of the A/B test is to see how people react to different posts and the data were seeing so far is that the posts with a like button receive positive feedback more often than ones who also feature both buttons. This may be for a large amount of reasons. But we'll continue to investigate going forward.

Going to lock this topic and make a new announcement regarding changes soon. We've reverted some changes back.