eriktrips's dashboard

it may just be me getting more annoyed, but I think the problem is getting worse. my replies are pinging as new replies over and over and over and over within a very short time.

well, I just posted a private friends-only plurk and it did *not* go to facebook and twitter. so. I dunno what happened with the first one.

yeah I agree with clicky here. if the friends-only plurk is currently a variation of the private plurk, I think they should be differentiated. I would find it annoying to unfollow someone and have their friends-only plurks still visible. if I don't want their private plurks either, blocking them seems reasonable. – eriktrips, on September 24, 2008 03:22

for what it's worth, I would expect that "do not follow xxxx's plurks" would "protect" me from xxxx's friends-only plurks as well. fortunately I don't find myself in soe's unenviable situation but it's not uncommon in my experience. since we can't really filter whose plurks we see except by using the follow/unfollow switch, I would hope that switch worked on every plurk sent by whomever I was unfollowing. you follow? unless you all wanted to implement a more finely-tuned follow/unfollow scheme, where the user could choose exactly which categories of plurks to follow/unfollow.

I don't know which case is more common--wanting not to follow *any* of xxxx's plurks, or wanting *only* to follow xxxx's "friends-only" plurks, but if I had to guess, I'd say the former. *not* wanting to see xxxx's public plurks while *wanting* to see xxxx's friends-only plurks seems the less likely scenario to me. – eriktrips, on September 23, 2008 21:13

Making karma optional seems like a good compromise to me. If it brings in x number of users, let them have it. The ones who don't like it can uncheck a clickybox and stay instead of rejecting plurk out of hand.

well, honestly, I thought this might be a compromise that would still allow something like "karma" to reward people who are active users of plurk. but I still think the algorithm needs to stop punishing people for sleeping or taking a day off from the internet. and I don't see why those with the highest karma scores should be highlighted in any way. karma indicates nothing about how interesting a person's plurk line is, nor its readability, nor its relevance to anything in particular. not to complicate the coders' lives too much, but an interests cloud would be more useful for locating plurkers whom one might want to follow. I'd even invert the cloud so that popular interests were smaller and obscure ones bigger. but I'm perverse.

karma needs to change substantially or go. that's the bottom line to me. – eriktrips, on September 06, 2008 11:40

Shoot, I think maybe if "Karma" were simply renamed to something more neutral like "activity index" it would make less of a negative impression on potential plurkers. I realize "karma" probably sounded cooler to the focus group than "activity index," but maybe some other pithy term that had nothing to do with a major religion's payback mechanism would be less off-putting. Maybe? I mean, why not "OCD score," you know?

As far as I can tell, I'm getting my karma dinged because I sleep during the day and work/plurk at night. Why else does my karma drop while I sleep? Whatever it is in the algorithm that punishes people for sleeping (ever--not just in the "customary" time frame for their region) needs to be eliminated.

My personal experience with the whole karma mechanism has been almost entirely negative. I like plurk over twitter because I think the threaded conversations make it a superior social networking application. But I have been unable to lure many twitter users over here precisely because they think "karma is dumb" and don't want to feel like they are always having to brown nose some entity--the application, the company, Amir, whomever--in order to stay in "good graces."

I suspect that those who spent many years in school being graded against their peers find karma an unpleasant reminder of that system's cruelty, bias, and arbitrariness. I know I do, and I was a "good student"!

Karma is causing plurk to lose potential users, users who are actually interesting and not "interesting" because they plurk "hello plurkingers!" every two hours. My honest opinion is that it seems cute to some at first but is ultimately hurting plurk's viability as a social networking microblogging application. Myself, I love most everything about plurk except karma, which I realize I could ignore, but there it is on my profile page with that stupid little downturned arrow every time I wake up and log in. Who wants to see that? Nobody I know.