is "karma" idea flawed for niche pligg sites? please read...

[daveyc]

that's a very interesting take on gaming comments...looks like they more than proved their point, though i do have to wonder if some of the slashdotters are a bit wary of digg's miraculous growth this past year...

[parul8ue]

Great post, Daveyc, thanks! found some of the suggestions very useful

I found this very relevant because we are running a niche site using pligg which is targeted at the development & non-profit community. this has the typical fragmentation of audience that you mention - conscious citizens with an appetite for news, but not much knowledge (hence their votes can often be biased by prevalent notions, even if wrong) and then experts who have spent their lives working on certain issues. Am sure people would greatly appreciate if expert contributions can be highlighted.

Also - we have experiences that the big chunk of audience is indeed inactive. even if they read (sometimes through RSS feeds), they don't vote. esp in this community because they are not very tech-savvy/familiar with web2.0 concepts - people treat the website like traditional news where they are consumers of information, not contributors. We don't have a solution to this yet and using pligg's karma, but plan to modify it in future.

About collusion detection, if I am remember right I had read that Digg folks are working on it. Imagine it would be tremendously complicated, lots of things to take care of, but useful & IMO, likely even necessary.