On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Matthew Revell <matthew.rev...@canonical.com> wrote: > On 15 February 2012 11:36, Jonathan Lange <j...@mumak.net> wrote: >> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Robert Collins >> <robe...@robertcollins.net> wrote: >>> .... include blueprints and bugs in the same bucket for karma >>> normalisation. (On the basis that blueprints aren't distinctly more >>> valuable than bug reports to a project). >>> >>> I realise this ignores the bigger questions around karma, but it seems >>> like a cheapish thing to me. >> >> Maybe drop rebalancing altogether? > > What was the intention behind rebalancing? To encourage more activity > in the lesser used parts of LP? To show that even a relatively small > amount of activity has a larger impact in a lesser used part of LP?
Karma was always to encourage use of Launchpad. Strangely enough, it does motivate quite a lot of people. Or at least it did... I haven't been paying attention to karma the last year or three. When talking about balancing, you need to be a bit more specific. Balancing is absolutely crucial - if I create an event worth one million points it rather obviously overshadows all the 1 and 2 point events. But with different sections of Launchpad being developed by different teams, balance was only relative within those sections. People using one section of Launchpad dominated the karma ladders, not because they put in more effort but because the arbitrary numbers assigned to the section of lp they used were higher, or they got them more frequently. So we added automatic rebalancing across realms, because we didn't know enough to do it ourselves. People using translations where on a more even footing to people working on bugs. It still sucked, but it was much better. More people where motivated to 'play Launchpad' once we fixed the top karma ladders to a) have representatives using different parts of Launchpad and b) penalize people paid to work on Launchpad (Canonical employees get their Karma halved IIRC). It became a game more people wanted to play because more people could actually participate and have a hope of recognition. > What does rebalancing give us? Seemingly unfair karma scores. Automatic rebalancing makes the karma scores fairer, because different regions of Launchpad have never had their scores manually balanced. It is unfair if 1 minutes effort working on bugs is worth the same as 20 minutes of working on translations. Now we have a better idea of what Launchpad looks like and how people use it, we can go through and rebalance the scores ourselves and turn off the automatic rebalancing. This will turn off the wobble (except when we manually tweak the scores again), and should be even fairer. mpt's old suggestion was for scores to be effort based - say 60 points for 1 minutes worth of effort. We should by now be able to actually score these events like that. > I wonder if karma's time has passed. We know that some people value it > but perhaps it's one of those things that doesn't justify its > maintenance costs. Are people *really* motivated by karma? If so, > karma is such a poor reflection of value provided that I imagine karma > only serves to disappoint most people who find it genuinely > motivating. Its weird, but yeah - it actually motivates some people. I am interested in jono's Ubuntu achievements work though - perhaps that sort of model is better? He is keep for a less gameable system, but in practice I don't think we have seen anyone bother to game lp karma - perhaps it is so obviously gameable that nobody has bothered as it just makes them look like a tosser. One way to see how many people who currently care is to twiddle the system and listen to the uproar. In the past, it has been surprisingly loud, and probably why nobody has gone ahead and twiddled the implementation despite some tentative agreements on direction in the past :) There are other ideas to make it better too. Displaying with a logarithmic scale was one that had traction, in order to close the gaps between the leaders and make catching up actually seem achievable. Even trashing displaying the score, and instead displaying your position (Ranked 267834th of 402876! Or 'Top 10%'. Or whatever). But these are orthogonal to the underlying score and automatic rebalancing. > If we did kill karma, I'd lobby to keep the list of karma earning > actions at ~/+karma; the most useful aspect of karma, to my mind. > > If the karma score went away, but we kept the activity list, would > anyone miss it? I've always said if we want an activity list, we should implement an activity list. Karma events are a rather poor implementation of an activity log. -- Stuart Bishop <stuart.bis...@canonical.com> _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : launchpad-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
