Greg Fowler's dashboard

still broken

According to the developers, karma is supposed to be a measure of a user's activity. When somebody plurks using a bot, it isn't the user who's being active, it's the bot. It's dishonest. And saying that there's a dishonest practise taking place is a lot different than saying that the sky is falling. IOW, clickykbd is being dishonest as well. Is it a question of morals? ethics? integrity? I think it is. – Greg Fowler, on September 14, 2008 01:41

That would add extra work to Plurk that I doubt they want to have to deal with, instead of the simple fix of just eliminating the penalty from the algorithm. Worse of all, it leaves users at the mercy of Plurk's honesty. Instead of transparency about what's going on, we'd have to trust Plurk to fairly decide whose excuse should allow them to escape the penalty. Frankly, from what I've seen so far, I don't trust Plurk at all. – Greg Fowler, on September 06, 2008 15:48

Alvin: In order to reinforce the arguement about why the penalty has to go. Last night I was penalized -0.16 for the 4am to 8am (Eastern) increment again. Over the past 13 days, I've earned a total of only +0.03 karma in that increment because that's when I sleep. Instead of the +0.52 that was earned by the bot cheaters. I just glanced at @martinbogo's stats, and it looks like he hasn't had a single penalty in the last 100 increments. That's a huge advantage that honest users cannot hope to compete with. – Greg Fowler, on September 06, 2008 15:42

mutya: Spit and bile? Sorry that you're so jaded by life. Can we take this back to what's happening on Plurk now, and forget about your job troubles? – Greg Fowler, on September 06, 2008 15:29

The people who identify the fact that a plurk is only to maintain karma are honest. That's the big difference. And in my case it's called political action, or activism... a means of alerting other members of the community about a problem that needs solving. BTW... political actions aren't hypocrisy... they're the backbone of democracy. – Greg Fowler, on September 05, 2008 23:44

Unfriending the karma bots will solve nothing. They fulfill their purpose when they plurk and get karma for it (and the bot owner avoids a karma penalty for inactivity). Whether anybody reads their nonsense or replies to it is of no consequence. – Greg Fowler, on September 05, 2008 23:38

David: The bots are a big problem so long as the karma algorithm punishes users for inactivity. Without that penalty the bots would still give their users an unfair karma increase that isn't deserved, but the advantage wouldn't be magnified so much.

As far as the 'noise' plurks are concerned, the majority of them can be attributed to the karma algorithm. If plurks were given less value and if replies were given more, then I think you'd see a much less populated timeline and a lot less nonsense. It's one of the points I made long ago in this article: http://plurkingpoppa.wordpress.com/#k... – Greg Fowler, on September 05, 2008 23:34

Alvin: It's nice of you to finally provide that minimum acknowledgment here in this new thread. But those of us who have been complaining about the unfairness of your karma algorithm deserved a response, and a better one than this, a long time ago.

Alvin: It's true that karma isn't so prominent a measure on the 'interesting plurker' page as it used to be. However... click on the arrow beside anybody's username on the timeline and their karma is displayed... visit their profile page and their karma is prominently displayed. But even if you eliminated those other things too, I don't think it would matter. Everybody knows about karma by now. They know it exists. Trying to hide the monster that you created in a closet probably isn't going to solve the problem. Also, simply hiding the problem doesn't do anything to address the unfairness of the inactivity penalty. – Greg Fowler, on September 05, 2008 23:04

mutya: I'm a community activist and used to publicly speaking my mind. I don't look for excuses to complain, but I'm not adverse to doing it when I think the situation warrants it. Are you one of those people who tries to discredit people who have good arguments to make when you can't refute the arguments? – Greg Fowler, on September 05, 2008 22:56

tamir: I know it's more than what you should have to do, but how about changing your email addy of record to a Yahoo addy (even if you have to create a Yahoo account to do it) and try again? – Greg Fowler, on September 01, 2008 22:15

tamar: to the right of where it says "My Profile", "My Friends", and "Alerts." That's where the link is (red background) that you have to click on to get Plurk to send an email to you. I had to to do it several times (when it finally worked, it told me immediately that it had sent an email). Hope this helps. – Greg Fowler, on September 01, 2008 21:51

Glad to see you jumping in on this Alvin.

Maybe I did over-react and take Amir's response out of context because of my frustration. But I don't think that I can be blamed for that. Like I've said many times without response from you, I think you have a serious communication problem. Not only the ESL issue, but the fact that you simply don't do enough of it. Not here, and not even on the Plurk blog. Maybe you need to hire somebody.

You say that you're constantly monitoring the karma algorithm issue and the user feedback. Well, you could have fooled me ;(

I agree with you that karma is a kind of an activeness indicator (but I disagree that that's all it is). Observation by me and others indicates that some activity in every 4-hour karma increment is required in order to achieve max. karma increase. Of course, this is just speculation, since you're unwilling to publish the algorithm for some reason. Whether that's to give an unfair advantage to some plurkers over the rest of us or not, who's to say?

But your secrecy does invite speculation, and you have only yourselves to blame for that. One thing is for sure, is that there is a penalty for not being active. Also for certain is the fact that such penalty is greatly resented by lots of plurkers. Not some... LOTS! I know that from the private emails that they send me agreeing with the posts that I've made.

You say that you realize that and you suggest that the algorithm reflects your attempt to reward good behaviour and penalize bad behaviour. But you won't reveal the algorithm so that we can verify that. So don't be surprised if many of us don't believe you.

What we do know, is the way that you punish us for NECESSARY inactivity. We could maybe understand a penalty for non-activity past a reasonable length of time (24 hrs. maybe?), but give us a break! The way you've got it set up now penalizes people for sleeping! And it rewards the people running the damn bots because they can avoid that!

I can accept you saying that you don't have the resources to monitor/police all the people running scripts at this time. But that doesn't excuse the unfairness of the current situation. And there IS a way for you to eliminate that unfairness. By eliminating the penalty for not participating until at least 24 hours have passed.

Thanks again for getting involved in the discussion. You should try it more often ;)

Clicking on the header link finally resulted in an email being received; clicking on the link in the email did successfully result in a confirmation from Plurk and now the notice is gone from my profile page. Issue resolved (for me...for now). – Greg Fowler, on September 01, 2008 19:28

eddieharris: I don't understand why you would feel it necessary to ask the question. Amir just claimed that he's doing a stellar job of answering questions here. See: http://getsatisfaction.com/plurk/topi...

Amir: it comes as no surprise to me that you would try to manufacture an excuse to ignore this issue... and people can go back through the previous posts and decide for themselves the very small percentage of posts that you reply to. – Greg Fowler, on September 01, 2008 18:40

Amir: as usual, you were way too quick to mark this problem as being solved... when I went into my account and re-entered my email addy nothing happened... i'm still seeing the "you need to validate" msg in my FF browser... also, isn't the acceptable practise to validate emails by sending a validation request to the registered email addy? because I haven't received one from Plurk :(