This arti­cle fol­lows a sim­i­lar train of thought as my last post, Qual­i­fy­ing “Web Karma”: It shouldn’t be a game. I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with com­mu­ni­ties and I’ve noticed, as per­haps many oth­ers have, that com­mu­ni­ties often gain momen­tum over time to a point where they are expand­ing at an almost unholy rate. You can clearly see this kind of growth in Digg, Red­dit, and even (to a lim­ited extent, cur­rently) Hacker News, if you’ve watched them over time.

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karma, n. the cos­mic prin­ci­ple accord­ing to which each per­son is rewarded or pun­ished in one incar­na­tion accord­ing to that person’s deeds in the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion.¹

Though not always called “karma” (Everything2 has a multi-faceted sys­tem involv­ing “reps” and “C!s,” and Slash­dot calls it a “score”), the con­cepts all serve the same pur­pose: karma has come to be a way of quan­ti­fy­ing the con­tri­bu­tions of a per­son to a par­tic­u­lar website.

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