First aves

Here’s a neat lit­tle gadget/bot combo that could prove very use­ful for pub­lic waves if the sys­tem caught on.

Add the Karma Gad­get and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get con­sis­tently low scores, they will be auto­mat­i­cally kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Of course there are some poten­tial prob­lems with such a tool: if a user expresses unpop­u­lar views in one wave and gets poor rat­ings, they might find them­selves banned from any future wave that uses the tool, regard­less of the sub­ject. If the tool took off in pop­u­lar­ity it could be quite hor­ri­ble to find your­self on the end of such banishment.

On the other hand, if the tool doesn’t get pop­u­lar it would be unre­li­able for crowd­sourc­ing opin­ions, let­ting in known trolls who had just not been rated on enough waves.

Despite these short­com­ings how­ever, I would love to see this devel­oped fur­ther (and even be inte­grated as part of the offi­cial spam-fighting tools of Wave), as I see great poten­tial in har­ness­ing the opin­ions of oth­ers in keep­ing waves free from known trolls and spammers.

One poten­tial use case is the imme­di­ate ban­ish­ment of those frus­trat­ing bots that pop up all over the place (Kanye-bot any­one?). I’m uncer­tain whether bots are in the fir­ing line (Karma-Bot itself seems immune and doesn’t show up in the rat­ing gad­get). I’m also unclear about what hap­pens if some­thing like the pub­lic group (which can be rated) gets con­sis­tently bad reviews.

As of writ­ing, the gad­get does not carry out bans and won’t until Google imple­ment the kick-out fea­ture. I will be fol­low­ing this tool as it devel­ops, and I’ll be look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties to use it. And if you see me on a wave that uses Karma, please be nice!

Karma: A Rep­u­ta­tion Rat­ing Sys­tem for Google Wave Users.