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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Good god, is this real? https://karmabot.chat/

Am I wearing enough pieces of flair?

So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

Some of the most valuable team members just quietly get things done, without making a song and dance about it and drawing everyone's attention. Sucks to be them, I guess.

My former employer did this until the most popular person and post was the one who complained about the lack of COLA raises after the CEO received a ten million dollar bonus. They tried hard to squash the whole discussion without being heavy handed but that failed miserably so they eventually told everyone to shut up and deleted the post. They've since changed the social media platform to something that allows them to approve all posts before they're seen by anyone else. I'm told now no one bothers to use it except HR and senior management for making announcement.

And any Slack interaction you do have is incentivised to be a fake (or at least shallow) happy-clappy karma-driven demonstration of Core Values and Team Spirit.

We use this at work and don't have any of the issues you are talking about. The only time I've seen the karma bot used is when an individual goes above and beyond for another individual. I have yet to see any other use of it, such as what you described. We are a remote-ish team (we have people in a centralized office but also have workers throughout the country) and all of our communications go through Slack. The use of karma bot for our department is to recognize hard work to all, even those who aren't in the office.

> So basically, companies are supposed to reward people for being gregarious/outgoing/funny/popular on Slack, rather than for getting their work done?

I just took a quick glance at their page, but don't see this, can you be more specific?

The example they give is rewarding a specific individual and rewarding a whole channel. As someone who like to quietly get things done, I have multiple time helped people around me and I'm pretty sure that active or not on the Slack, many of them would have given me the reward. A project channel contains people related to a project, them being active or not on that channel wouldn't affect the reward.

I have less of a problem with the product itself than the way it's marketed, with completely unsubstantiated claims about improving employee retention. The message I get here is "your employees are like small children that need to be managed with Slack trinkets", which is too bad, because I think the bot itself looks kinda neat.

Somebody monetised karma bots. Wow. I remember making one of those in mIRC script twenty years ago.

Reward your high-karma team members with Amazon gift cards or a day off ... guess that could never be exploited?

Saddest part is that in their marketing, right next to that is dinner for one!

We actually use this at work and it seems to be ok. I don't know anything about it other than your able to use a command in slack to give somebody karma and there is a running total that the individual has.

Bad idea. I prefer a big gong in the office we ring when someone has merged in 1000 LoC. With a trip to the Bahamas on 100KLoC. Our LoC OKR is being crushed!

It seems a little perverse to reward the most verbose devs, unless clients pay by LoC?

I forgot the /s

And the \n

I suppose if you're an engineer out of touch with humans that wants to automate the motivation of your team...

I have no idea.

I'm very confused. Can someone explain what this does?

As I understand it, it's like HN voting, but where the guidelines say you must work hard & espouse Core Values, and the points do matter.

And these appraisals are weekly, shared with your colleagues, and administered by a Slackbot. Welcome to 2020.

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