Our new Rails app: pplrep
pplrep.com
pplrep.com
If I randomly rep enough people I will become A GOD.
There's a limit on how often you can rep a single person (once every 24 hours), and if you are to spam different people with rep, your rep is likely to be deleted by the person's profile, which will take your score back down two points. Since a person's profile is public, they likely don't want their profile filled with spam rep or to like their reps are fake. We are hoping members will play their role in moderating in their own profiles.
Is the amount of rep a person gives out visible on their profile? That would be useful in gauging how genuine their motiviation is.
For example, let's say I started a business and I need first customers, which I cannot get without the reputation. One cheat is to simply create 100 accounts on your website, each referring to each other and giving points to each other. Even if you manually check each account, which I think you wouldn't be able to do at a certain point, I can game the system and gain fake reputation.
An alternative would be a system based on connections. For instance, if my friend or a friend of my friend gave your account some points, then I can be more sure of the validity of your reputation. The more connections you have to me and the shorter the route, the more reputable you appear to me. On the other hand, if all your points come from your own fake accounts which have no connections to any of my friends, your reputation appears 0 to me, even though you have 100 points.
As one might expect, the system never was as honest as you'd hope: you'd have massive "fame trading" rings, because what's the point of giving away your fame for the day if you don't get anything in return? And, more maliciously, there would be guilds and clans who'd designate targets to 'defame on sight': forty people defaming you over the course of a week would usually put you into the negative hundreds, sort of ruining that stat permanently (unless, of course, you 'bought fame'.)
Now while on paper it's not very different from the reddit/HN/etc. karma system, in reality it is- on many such forums, the community is very compact[2], and there is a greater sense of member hierarchy (I believe that having picture avatars contributes to that, as they are very quickly remembered). The resulting social construct is often very interesting, with members staging coups against one another, trying to gain power (= being a moderator), and so on.
I've spent many hours as a teenager in such communities in the early 2000s, and it was very entertaining and interesting in terms of human dynamics- pretty much cyberpolitics where the goal is to rule on a forum rather than a territory.
I'm certain that there are tons of social experiments that can be done in the context of cyber-communities, and that what we have today (social news sites, social network) barely scratches the surface.
[1]: http://www.simplemachines.org
[2]: that is, for any 2 random active members, the probability that they have posted in a same thread is much closer to 1 than on reddit/HN/etc.; this is definitely helped by the fact that threads tend to be linear in such forums
A lot of this research is done under Self-Determination Theory.
I can say that based on my own anecdotal experience I feel pretty good when I receive a rep, and I also feel good when I give people rep. Others who have used pplrep have reported similar experiences. And I think that's a good thing. Certainly better than dealing with the drama that occurs on other social networks.
Are you doing anything special on the backend?
Thanks for the kind words.
In my opinion this would be a feature of a larger product. It would be cool to implement it in Hacker News. Where you can get Karma for helping others here. But it would still be an add-on. The focus of karma in hacker news is to incentivize people on submitting better articles. What does it mean for me to have more reps ?
BTW, that isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is an important aspect of the sites privacy policy.
<div class="hpar"></div> should probably be clickable. I probably clicked on it 5 or 6 times before i had to scroll down.
Uhh I'm no expert but it seems like rep points don't really mean much if you can award them to yourself.
It may help the reputation of the site itself to have a real user base. I know it's slow going in the beginning when you get out there - but I simply don't understand this.