Disabling Beer Karma

Another vote for bringing back the Karma.

I found more often than not that the Poobahs were also the BA members deserving of their Poobahhood -- writing eloquent reviews, considered responses in the forum, and lengthy opinions on all things related to malt and hop.

However, it definitely frustrated me that some members were so focused on Karma to the exclusion of site etiquette. The classic example here is the members who post first on WBAYDN when they are actually answering the question of WBDYDLN, or even WBDYDLW, just so they get that first crush of likes. I agree that the current Karma system is weighted too heavily to likes, and ideally would be balanced by length of response -- although this could result in Karma-grubbers vomiting 1,000+ words of inanity on forums and reviews.

TL : DR -- PLEASE bring the Karma back; as to how to make it better... Nothing will ever be perfect.

 

A lot of good discussion in this thread and many valid opinions expressed. I agree with many about revising BK scoring and bringing it back, but if that doesn't happen, xin loi. I'm here for the expansion of my knowledge base and to hopefully help others when I can. As for titles, well, poobah was fine but my new self-anointed title "Grand Wrangler of the Sacred Reptile" really makes me feel important!

 

What I would say has been said many times over in this thread, so in summary... Fine if karma goes, fine if its brought back and it will not impact how I use the site.

If it returns in some shape or form, "likes" should not be part of the equation. Too many people are focused on receiving likes for their photos (new or recycled) or saying "hi" in every new member/welcome thread.

 

I've always wanted to be a kentucky colonel. Congrats on your promotion.
Cheers to Karma!

 

I don't think so. I think the folks who are interested in beer, in the overall sense, will stick around. The folks who were just here for "The Game" are probably too busy chasing PokeyMenz right now to even check the site. The timing between BK leaving and PokemonGo arriving was some damn coincidence, no?

 

Think there was something at like 5,000 too. Hell, I can't remember. But man, that fez was sweet.

 

Definitely should bring the karma back. It was something fun.

 

Karma was cool and all but now that it's gone my beer consumption most certainly will not lessen

 

Lame. Karma rules. But I agree with this guy.

 

My few posts with photo's do not meet these stipulations... Darn it!

My flip phone pics of beers i'm drinking are super high quality though. Like them?!?!?!?

Hehehe

 

Being more devil's advocate than completely disagreeing with your point, if Beer Karma drives the user more than Beer Advocacy, I do wonder about its usefulness.

Being more realistic, if Beer Karma drives more people to think about how they are contributing (which it seemed to be doing more than I would've though), then bring it back. It seems like a good thing that motivates a behavior that seems genrally good in nature. I can admit there was a small influence to BK in my years on this site, but only to a certain degree.

But non-BK things I have always done (and encourage others, though I have seen failures):

• When adding a beer, do a decent review of it. I've seen added beers with no ratings at all, let alone reviews. There are no extra points for this mentality, but it still feels right
• Check the archived beers before you add a new beer, because sometimes the initial person that added the beer paid little attention to the "availability" field. Put in an "update" to reactivate the beer with the best info you have. BA has generally been responsive to most update requests, especially if you provide some justification (i.e. link to brewery's website). Can be difficult knowing the initial intention of the brewery, (admittedly have issues knowing once vs rotating and default to latter in confusion) but if it is actually a new beer, considering erring on the side of caution..

Slight diversion to BK yay or nay - as I've put forth my thoughts earlier on it. Just thinking that artificial rewards shouldn't drive behavior - doing the right thing should. If you don't feel rating/reviewing/discussing beer is the "right thing" if you don't get points for it, I won't argue with you. It is just beer after all. But I likely also won't miss you if you leave. Just as no one else would if I did the same.

(yep - had enough beers tonight to actually throw that out there - not that said drinking altered my views)

 

I don't know if anyone will ever even get this far in reading these post's, but I have. And I think that may be a point in itself. The points are fun. The status is fun. More importantly, the camaraderie and enjoyment of others and their opinions, the communal bar that is WBAYDN and community beyond that makes you excited and unembarrassed to enjoy beer on a geeky level or not. I myself like the points and status, etc., but am not too concerned of them coming back, as long as I can pull up a stool at the virtual bar and enjoy what I am drinking, alongside everyone else who is doing the same. Cheers!

 

Will this tool be able to merge reviews from the same reviewer for duplicate beer pages, or will it delete one of the two? I remember seeing thousands of reviews for Left Hand Milk Stout Nitro disappear overnight because of the dubious decision that it was the same beer as Left Hand Milk Stout. If the tool could preserve and merge both reviews (and maybe average the two ratings), I think you'd see a lot less reviewer backlash. And you'd keep site content that's already there instead of senselessly deleting it.

 

There was a thread a ways back with a guy asking if he should mention his poobah status in a job interview, boy, he must be upset over this. I hope he doesn't lose his job when his management finds out he is no longer a poobah.

 

Agreed. Excellent post. I studied a bit of behavior modification and analysis for fun, so I'd like to hit on what I'm seeing here. Beer Advocate's Beer Karma system provides positive reinforcement on an increasing interval schedule, and when you look at data about establishing and maintaining behaviors, this positive reinforcement + schedule has a very profound effect on creating and establishing behavior for the long term. Unfortunately, doing the right thing is often not a driving force for human behavior (unless of course, doing the right thing has been paired with other reinforcement or repetedly displayed in modeled behavior). While the current system is not the most effective at increasing the some response dimension as far as BA posting behavior goes, it certainly has a more profound impact in both the short and long term than simply posting or doing the right thing.

Here's a general chart showing what I'm talking about:



BK seems to target the lower right graph.

Yes, the positive reinforcer does come late (outside of 60 seconds), so it could be argued this is not a positive reinforcement system at all (where as immediately rewarding BK for getting "X" done would be without a doubt a positive reinforcement system); however, the general displays of behaviors shown emphasizes a positive reinforcement schedule on a fixed interval.

Essentially what's happening here is BA yanked the reinforcement system from under its subjects, and we're seeing an outlash, as the behavior is no longer being reinforced. Clearly BK was an reinforcement for everyone, although its usefulness varied with each user. Regardless, the removal of BK has provided the type of response as would be expected from an extinction procedure.

To get back to the first part of your post, this site is about being a beer advocate, so the use of BK could be seen as questionable - especially if it is keeping hundreds of daily traffic on this site. The question I propose is: if we want to focus on Beer Advocacy, do we have any intentions of welcoming new members? While this site does have a new members section, and it is quite friendly (perhaps do to BK for posts....?), it does have a bit of a pretentious vibe to it every now and again. Welcoming more and more in, even with trivial site features, could improve the overall worth of the site. It gets more folks talking about beer daily than the handful of deep research questions proposed every few weeks.

As for posting new beers and reviewing - I could not agree any more. I have only posted one new beer, but I made sure to write notes out so I could review it when it was made official on here. Reviewing a beer you took the time to post helps the entire community. If you post a new beer or place, please review it! It may be hard to get, rare, or in a remote location, so let us all know what we're missing out on!

Cheers.

 

I agree. This is the most interesting point I have taken from the whole thread. I had no idea, and if you had asked me a couple weeks ago I definitely wouldn't have thought that the points were "making" people want to contribute to the site above and beyond what they ordinarily would. If that is the case, it seems like a nice arrangement for everybody.

 

I vote with the folks who have suggested that elimination of beer Karma will tend to lower motivation on the part of users to make a contribution to the site through such things as exploring new styles and writing reviews of them, adding places and reviewing them, ticking off new beers and new beers added, etc.

More importantly it increase the amount of effort required to quickly and easily guess at what level of information/feedback to provide to others asking questions in the forum.

So on the whole, since beer Karma was not crippling the site (even though it required more capacity) I think it should be retained. Also I suspect that much of the overhead of running beer Karma is based on decisions made about processing and ways of coding that could be revised and improved with the more modern hardware and software environment that exists today.

Given that I suggest that revision and improvement (as has been promised for Beer Karma for some years now) be implemented rather than simply discontinuing it.