MojoAnalysis

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Essentially, you've got three behaviors at KuroShin (k5):

Writing (both stories and comments)
Moderating (again, stories and comments)
Reading

What's the goal? Maximize content quality. To that end, KuroShin implements a number of user moderation systems. Since some SourcesOfConflict include MeaningConfusion?, we begin with clarifying definitions of the systems.

Story rating: The cumulative result of voting -1, 0, or +1 on a story. This value determines whether to delete the story, post it to a section, or post it to the front page of KuroShin.

Comment rating: Any user can rate any comment replying to a story from 0 to 5; this value is akin to movie or restaurant ratings, i.e. think "4 star movie". The comment rating is the average of all the ratings for the given comment. The ratings are used to sort the comments in terms of worth so TheAudience can quickly get the wheat without wading through all the chaff.

KuroshinMojo: Mojo is a magic number calculated from comment ratings used to determine trustability of a user. Specifically, it is not the comment ratings.

We will ignore story rating mostly in this discussion, although it will crop up. Now, since Mojo and comment rating are connected, riding on each rating are the following functions:

Comment sorting;
Spam, trivia, FlameBait removal (comment filtering);
Trusted user acclamation; and
Untrusted user acclamation.

Essentially, the comment rating system is trying to resolve the following forces:

Determining the DynamicValue of members (how much we trust them)
Determining the static value of comments and stories.
Fairness, or validity of the ratings to writers.
Usefulness to readers.
Ease to raters.
Authenticity, or verification of the ratings. (i.e. no abuse)
Computational overhead

And of course,

: Everything in moderation, even moderation. -- James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1923)

To that end, there are a number of KuroshinRatingIssues and a consequent number of KuroshinRatingSuggestions.

CategoryRatingSystem CategoryWebLog CategoryKuroshin

Slashdot Karma vs. Scoop Mojo

Slashdot karma is cumulative, confers special powers, and tends to be self-reinforcing. The fact that both karma and moderation at Slashdot had to be artificially constrained (1-50 and 1-5, respectively), should be a clear indicator that something is wrong.

Scoop moderation has several crucial properties:

It is bounded, restricted to a range of 1-5.
It is convergent -- with more moderation, a single final value emerges from the noise.
It is independent of the number of people moderating -- a comment's moderated level can range from 1 to 5, regardless of whether one person has moderated or 100.
It is continuous. By allowing fractional values (in reality, two decimal points), Scoop allows for many distinct moderation values, making arbitrarily fine distinctions in ranking possible (though not necessarily meaningful).

: Mojo shares many of these attributes, but modifies the convergence rule: it is short-term convergent (in the short term, more moderations tend to converge toward a value), but weighted toward recent activity. It also does not convey special privileges in posting comments (e.g.: boosted score).

Slashdot karma allows 'whores' to accumulate a quantity which is not immediately responsive to current behavior, which tends to reinforce the score (more highly moderated posts tend to get more moderation, moderation score is not independent of number of moderators, quite contrary), and abusive behavior becomes possible. While it's possible to get an elevated K5 status, it takes continued effort to keep it.

CategoryRatingSystem

MojoAnalysis

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