Karma & vote strength in 2018

Hey all,

First of all, I’d like to thank you all for putting up with the glitches that have been plaguing us in the past several months. What started as a way to stabilize the website, unrolled as a continuing series of troubleshooting one issue after another.

Here’s a short timeline of the key events:
– Several months ago ManageWP.org started having stability issues. Our investigation found that it was hitting the hosting resource limit due to suboptimal code. Most of these issues revolved around the way karma is calculating everything but your blood cell count.
– As we dug into the karma algorithm we managed to simplify the calculation, but also fixed the calculation errors that caused karma to balloon for some users.
– After some celebratory high fives, we realized that the karma calculation, now fixed, is actually bad. It siphons karma from contributors, rewarding passive activity. That’s why our most prolific users ended up with very low vote strength

So at that point we had a choice:
– Roll back to the original karma algorithm, and bring back stability issues
– Tweak the current algorithm
– Roll up our sleeves, rip out the karma algorithm and replace it with a meaningful algorithm that rewards active contributors

So we opted for no.3, cleared up the schedule for several developers, and got down to business. We should be able to get the new algorithm in place in the next few weeks.

What can you expect?

Karma will be retired
While a fun little gamification, it’s not a contributing factor. The vote strength is the true value there. And since both of them are based on the same stats (i.e. shares, upvotes, etc.), we will focus on the vote strength. The higher vote strength you have, the more impact your upvote will have.

Vote strength will be tiered
Based on your activity, you will be placed in one of the 3 tiers:
– Average vote strength: the default strength that you start with
– High vote strength: an active contributor, with a fair share of shares, upvotes & comments
– Exceptional vote strength: the most active percentage of the member base

Inclusion
Sharing rights will be given automatically after certain amount of activity. This will help new users become active, since in the current state a moderator has to approve the request manually.

Better moderation
We’re introducing a couple of tools that will make moderation easier, and at the same time we’ll log all the actions so we could go back and see why a moderator removed a particular article.

Feedback loop
We will definitely need your help fine tuning the new algorithm. We will also need to start a conversation on what constitutes a good article, because our article guidelines are also due for an update. Expect more feedback posts in the future, and we’re also looking at setting up a Trello board to discuss various topics.

———-

Those are our plans for 2018 in a nutshell. Let me know your thoughts, since all of you as much members of the community as I am.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/17089/karma-vote-strength-in-2018

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/karma-vote-strength-in-2018/