incentivizing tasks with karma rewards

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From Luke:

New feature that would allow us to incentivize tasks (e.g. proofreading The 
Sequences ebook) with LW karma.

My best guess is that the easiest way to do this is to set it up so that admins 
can manually add chunks of karma to a user account, but when doing so they must 
specify a reason, and as a matter of policy that reason must always be "This 
user performed task X, which was previously assigned a value of Y karma points."

Our first use-case for this would be to set up proofreading the sequences as a 
volunteer project at SingularityVolunteers.org. We'd promise people 100 karma 
for every 5 hours of work on the project, and we'd have volunteer coordinators 
checking to see whether people's claims of work roughly match with the output. 
Then a particular LW admin would give the karma rewards once per month, or 
something like that.

Karma rewards for tasks should be listed publicly, I think, to address concerns 
that it will be abused by admins. There should probably be a single page where 
anyone can view all the latest karma rewards given. Users receiving karma 
rewards should also be notified via their inbox.

As always, your feedback on how best to implement the feature is most welcome.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by wjmo...@gmail.com on 18 Jan 2013 at 3:11

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This is going to need two additions to the site UI - one for admins to access 
the reward page, and one for users to view recent rewards. The admin link can 
probably be added as a button in the sidebar near preferences/logout/etc. I 
can't think of a great place for the user-side link though, any ideas? If 
there's no good place for a link, it could also be put in the sidebar and be 
directly viewable on all pages, as recent posts and upcoming meetups are.

Original comment by zildjoh...@gmail.com on 18 Jan 2013 at 6:49

• Added labels: Estimate-3

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I guess just make a separate page that lists all karma rewards, newest at the 
top, and link that page below the 'TOP CONTRIBUTORS, ALL TIME' section in the 
sidebar. No need to list a few recent karma rewards in the sidebar, though.

Original comment by lukep...@gmail.com on 23 Jan 2013 at 9:50

• Changed state: Authorised

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The current sidebar is:
user area | nearest meetups | recent comments | recent posts | recent wiki 
edits | new on OB | tags | top contributors 30 days | top contributors all time

… which seems to be thematically organised rather than strictly organised by 
importance.

"Recent karma awards" seems to fit that list after "recent wiki edits", and 
would fit a little better if we showed the two recent awards. The cost of 
making the sidebar a little longer seems to me to be small given its current 
length… but its current length is large, and makes every page on the site 
fairly complex.

ALTERNATIVELY

Most of the sidebar (other than recent comments and posts) is little used 
(based on clicks). We could move Tags, the two Top Contributors widgets and the 
sitemeter widget (need to check license) to /about below the wiki content on 
that page, and add recent karma rewards there. We could add a link to that page 
titled "more site data" at the bottom of the sidebar.

Original comment by Matthew.Fallshaw on 23 Jan 2013 at 11:48

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Moving Tags, the sitemeter widget (unless this makes it stop counting hits), 
and the all-time Contributors to /about below the Wiki content makes sense to 
me.  I'd keep the top Contributors in the last 30 on the sidebar.  It would be 
nice to show top all-time karma awards on the /about page but only show a karma 
sidebar if there's been a karma award in the last 30 days, and then put it 
above New on OB.  Failing that, I'd say put it below Contributors, Last 30 
Days.  Other opinions?

Original comment by yudkow...@gmail.com on 21 Jun 2013 at 9:47

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Original comment by wjmo...@gmail.com on 25 Jun 2013 at 2:10

• Changed state: Started

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Copied sidebar comments into: 
http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=387

Original comment by wjmo...@gmail.com on 25 Jun 2013 at 2:13

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Is there a reason this hasn't been closed?

Original comment by predicta...@gmail.com on 18 Jan 2014 at 11:59

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Not that I know of; seems done to me.

Original comment by lukep...@gmail.com on 19 Jan 2014 at 12:00

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Original comment by wjmo...@gmail.com on 19 Jan 2014 at 9:52

• Changed state: Verified