How About a Social Media Karma Algorithm?
I keep pondering the merits of a social media karma rating system. I’m a big advocate of letting community standards be established by the community itself. So once it’s set up, a karma rating system would automatically run itself (behind the scenes) based on community member activities and behavior.
In the real world, who do you most respect as an opinion leader? For me, it’s someone who’s been around a long time (village elder), is involved in the community (but not too much), has a positive reputation and is friends with other respectable people. Maybe it’s a city council member, a business leader or a well-liked athletic coach. It doesn’t matter who they are. They’re viewed as being “good people” by the community at large. In the online world, we don’t have the luxury of knowing a person’s reputation based on their nickname and thumbnail sized photo.
In theory, a composite karma rating could be calculated by an algorithm that includes the following factors:
- How long has a person been a member?
- Total number of contributions: posts, comments, etc.
- Average daily activity
- Positive/Negative rankings by other community members
- Number of blocks (people who have blocked your comments completely)
- Activity association with other people
The key to a system like this is the administrative control. While the mathematical formula wouldn’t change, a site administrator would be able to customize the relevance rating for each factor, making some more important than others. Here’s an example scenario:
Save the Whales (or whatnot) Community Website
Primarily driven by wildlife biologists, environmental activists, media, students and philanthropists. This community values the opinions of long-standing members (reflecting experience), engaging conversation and collaboration (smart people sharing info with each other). The site admin would adjust their karma system to uptick the value of membership duration, rankings, daily activity and association. So a person who has been using the site longer than average, adds comments that get “thumbs up” from other members and participates in a healthy number of discussions with other higher ranked people gets a good karma rating score. A newly registered person who has neutral community rankings and always comments along with other lower karma members will end up with a lower score. This person is likely not adding value to the community conversation and only participates during “pack” attacks.
Given the organic nature of ratings, scores would (mathematically) change daily. And to prevent people from “gaming” the system, karma ratings would be displayed as simple, colored icons — not as numbers.
- Gold = Highest/Best Ranking
- Mustard = Strong Rating
- Green = Average
- Maroon = Somewhat Negative
- Red = Lowest/Worst Ranking
I’d leave it up to usability experts to determine icons and number of colors, but you get the idea. This is all theoretical stuff that would auto-magically blend into the background on site. I shall call this my Karma Chameleon.
Thoughts? Add a comment below…
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Comments
UPDATE:
Making Social Networks Profitable
Google’s new approach could offer advertisers coveted online communities
Kim Ratcliff on August 2, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
Gary,
Thought-provoking posts and good recommended blogs you’re sharing here.
Hats off!
Kim
P.S. If you are in the office at noon on Monday, want you to meet a blogger friend of mine who will be in the house. Her name is Dawn Friedman. Check her out at http://www.thiswomanswork.com/