Power without accountability…
So, for any who don’t know, I’m one of the site admins/forum admins at gotwoot.
Recently we upgraded from a very crappy forum software to a much less crappy one, and in the process got several new features. One of them is a “reputation system” plugin.
The basic idea is that users get “reputation power” based on how many posts they’ve made, how long they’ve been members, and how highly other people think of them. They can use this power to influence the reputation scores of other people. Not really any big rewards or benefits from it … it’s a dumb popularity contest game for the forumgoers to play — and people who get to very high positive reputation levels get the reward of being able to set their own custom user titles.
And you know, most people tend to be playing pretty nicely… giving positive points for good contributions, and negative points for bad ones. Good posters are coming out ahead, bad ones are staying low or going negative. On the whole, I’d say the experiment has been pretty interesting, and certainly not a straight-up failure.
But there’s a few downsides I’ve seen too. One of them is that people take it too seriously. They’re offended every time someone gives them a negative rep hit. And since the comments are anonymous, there’s been a lot of guesswork and drama going on involving people trying to figure out who gave them the rep they got. And the last thing we need is drama.
For a while I had our moderators able to see who gave them a comment. The mods were an “invisible” group, meaning they’ve already got limited accountability for their actions. But giving them the ability to see who repped them without the users knowing they were repping people with power who could find out caused more drama, as some of the moderators started making retaliatory rep-hits.
It’s interesting to see, though… basically the whole system is a way to distribute power to the people without necessarily tying it to accountability. And while many — I’d say the vast majority of people — do fine with that, it’s amazing to see how poorly some people react.
There’s systematic cynics who just like negative-hitting everyone. There’s the rep-whore types who’re signing their positive hits fishing for returned favors. There’s people repping several year old posts to get around the fanout factor so they can re-rep people they like. What I’m most amazed about is how quickly those abuses started up. It was almost immediate… like the abusers didn’t even have to think about it to find the weaknesses of the system.
I think this serves as a commentary on human nature. Most people are generally good, honest people. But you can’t count on everyone being good or honest, and need to build in systematic ways to prevent abuses.