I'm not sure that the current sticker system creates the incentives one would want.
There's just one dimension to the social credit score, which broadly measures a number of things:
- Ability to identify the culture of the site and adhere to it.
- Ability to identify the political leaning of each thread and agree with the users who frequent it.
- Ability to make good posts.
- Not being a lolcow.
- Ability to harvest likes from off-topic discussion boards - which are essentially an entirely different site glommed onto Kiwi Farms by virtue of the old school internet culture here at KF. If that's something the site admin wants, then they should consider it.
- One's political leaning, ideally in a manner which encourages engagement (calling one another fascists, Nazis, homosexual, libtards, etc).
The issues with this are:
- There aren't measurements for each dimension that you want or don't want on the site.
- There aren't stickers that affect multiple measurements, or multiple stickers per post to judge a post based on these measurements.
- There aren't completely separate stickers for each board that correlate with the culture or purpose of that board, or in the case of Off-Topic the lack of a purpose. If your sticker scores for the On-Topic boards are nil and those for the Off-Topic boards are very high, then other users should be able to know this and let it reflect on any poor posts you make in the On-Topic boards.
- The lack of multiple measurement dimensions means that it's hard to categorize a user based only on their social credit score. A better set of metrics with which users could rate one another's posts would allow users and moderators to quickly categorize other users. If combined with achievements based on those metrics and improved user tools could allow other users to do things, like ignore rampant A&H posters, quickly spot (by KF standards) obsessive weirdos and gayops, identify vote brigaders, and identify good candidates for the staff and moderation teams.
There are a number of problems with implementing this, the biggest of which are limited time/resources, more pressing matters, and designing it to be backwards compatible with the existing stickers.
The simplest thing to do would be to make 3 scores:
- On-Topic: the same as normal but only measured by ratings for posts in the On-Topic boards.
- Off-Topic: same as above, but convert the existing ratings to very similar ones (pull out your thesaurus) for the Off-Topic boards that aren't Autistic Thunderdome.
- Short Bus: ditto, but with ratings that simultaneously reward the user for making relevant posts while also ridiculing them for wasting precious hosting resources.
Furthermore, you could encourage people to donate by reducing the effect of negative stickers by 1 if they donate money. And give "boosters" that allow them access to an advanced user control panel that lets them do things like ignore people with specific metrics or achievements, automatically follow people, or automatically negrate all posts (up to a certain amount of posts per amount of money donated) certain users make. You could also limit stickers given to certain amount within a certain time rating, based on number of posts, based on sticker rating, and all of those plus the amount and frequency of money donated.
Nearly every post in the Social Justice Warriors thread is getting this rating.
