Karma Suit Ya! - Part 1
Written by @marcemarc on Wednesday, 15 January 2020
I’ve always thought it funny that Umbraco put a number on Karma…
the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.
When I started developing with Umbraco I was fascinated and repelled by this idea that all tracked interactions with the Umbraco community would somehow ‘attract a score’ and it seemed to have been a real driver and measure of interactiveness in the history of the community….
A lot of what I say here is ‘before my time’ in the Umbraco community and based on hearsay but:
...references to Karma / Karmageddon / the Karma Wars, all seemed to be part of Umbraco folklore, and I was drawn to the stories like future digital archaeologists will be... but also a little bit scornful ... there was a man, (I heard whispered in awe), called ‘The Karmanator’**… and what an absolute dick he must be I thought… I was repelled and I vowed never to be arsed with Karma nor ever post in the Umbraco Forums… to this day I have never actually posed a question in the Our Umbraco Forum…which is odd, although I have of course often found the answer there…
Your Karma score, for a while, determined whether you would be entered into an ‘end of season’ community vote, to be awarded the status of MVP around the time of Codegarden… which, although the accumulation of Karma was anonymous, this kind of final ballot meant ‘nice and popular’ people won the MVP status ahead of the particular score anyways… but this was ok, as they were nice and popular people and ‘being nominated’ was a thing in itself to be cherished.
… so it wasn’t meaningless... gaining ‘karma points’ wasn’t just throwing shapes at the Universe for the joy of it - there was an identifiable reward for the actions… and so this encouraged:
Gamification!
Essentially people trying to get as much Karma as possible for the sake of having a higher Karma score than somebody else... and given that ‘any reply’ in the forum gave you a Karma point… in the competitive spirit of Karma hunting… you’d see quite a lot of “great you got it working”, follow up replies, and well, it would be harsh to say ‘blatant comments’ just for karma sake… but people were rushing to get their answers in… but there was a sense of fun to this competitive edge, and since the people were nice and knowingly almost ironically taking part in the game, was it all bad? All the time? And did this earn the community its coveted friendly reputation in the first place?, ... after all ... few questions went unanswered… and the gamification meant lots of questions were resolved properly because a resolved question delivered 10 karma points!, ...so there was an increased incentive to find an acceptable answer… like a free market economy… but also important to acknowledge the people did genuinely want to help others, and in fact ‘each other’... it was a smaller community, so you would likely meet the people you’d helped in person. And in true ‘Karma terms' - people would buy someone a drink, or a gift… or just say thanks in real life.
… but the competitive nature seemed to get silly, and cross a line and I'm not actually sure what that was but it probably became a little bit unsustainable and so changes were made …
Karma Police
The public league ladder of Karma points disappeared from Our.Umbraco, the MVP nominations were no longer based on karma numbers alone, quality of answers was also considered, although the calculation of this was not necessarily transparent… it took the edge off of the gamification, balance restored to the forum...
...But shsssh secretly karma still seemed an important factor… and some folk would take to the forums a month or so before MVP announcements were due… in the hope of being noticed, and become anointed as an MVP. And anyone who said they didn't is lying.
Umbraco Training
About this time I had begun teaching the popular and comprehensive Umbraco Level 2 official training course (this is a different story of how this came to pass), and I spent a lot of my time talking to and helping developers that were new to the Umbraco community and along with Umbracoman! Doug (L1) introduced the existence of Our Umbraco and some of the stories behind Karma to new Umbracians… encouraging people to go answer questions themselves and build and spread Karma…but also pointing out it’s a really good way to learn Umbraco, as solving ‘real life’ problems is often the point at which we understand something clearly… rather than stepping through idealised situations on a training course (I’d say that at the end of the course obviously...)
During this time a student asked, “why have you only got 150 Karma on the forum then?”
And I realised I probably ought to practice a little about what I preached and have a Karma score higher than that… and actually even if you weren’t ‘going for it for MVP purposes’ - that your Karma score ‘did’ say something about you…
But I didn’t want to become an uber-competitive Karma whore - At the time a score of around 3,000 seemed completely ‘unbelievable’... (Karma like in real life doesn’t reset or rundown over time), I would never catch up, nor would I want to, or more importantly ‘be perceived to be trying to’ and I wouldn’t want to take Karma out of the mouths of those still battling out to somehow win… but I thought if I could get to 1,000 Karma then I wouldn’t seem such a big hypocrite…
Around this time a new option was added to the forum, the ability to filter by ‘only topics with no replies’
I figured if I concentrated on this list, and looked at questions that hadn’t been answered in over a week, I wasn’t going to tread on anyone's toes, and well imposter wise, if my answers weren’t very helpful… people would less likely be annoyed…
There are currently 13700 unanswered questions on the forum (that doesn’t seem very friendly!) but the number of unanswered questions also probably made it ok for me to answer some.
This was around the end of the summer 2015, and my first few replies didn’t solve the problems or if they did the person didn’t reply, but then suddenly...
Here is my first ever reply with an accepted answer:
And Cesar’s reply:
Yey, I’d helped someone, and it felt good!
An hour on Our
I decided to dedicate an hour on ‘our’ a week (snappy slogan right?) and because I was trying to justify to myself that I wasn’t buying into the whole karminator thing I invented lots of rules to follow to keep myself ‘real’… I’d..
never answer a question I didn’t already know the answer to,
never follow up with a ‘great you got it working’ message,
and certainly under no circumstances ‘would you like to mark my answer as the answer, because it will help others, but I want 10 karma points!!!’ kinda messages…
Owzat!
I pondered a lot about gamification and how bad it could be, but also saw people answering questions too and helping people, and my increase in score made me happy - and I thought what if you could actually make the forum into a game? One that was ‘against’ yourself rather than a leaderboard against others… when I was a kid I was obsessed with the ‘dice cylinder’ version of Cricket called ‘Owzat!’ and would spend many hours playing Test Matches against myself (and I wasn’t an only child!)
...there being no real skill to the outcome of those games… struck a chord with me when answering forum questions… as there seemed to be no real correlation between an answer being accepted and ‘turning green’ and boosting your score with a yield of 10 karma points, or just remaining as a ‘might be right, might be wrong’ general 1 karma point reply… in the same way that rolling the cylinder could be a ‘6’ or ‘out’….
During a long hot summer in the midlands, probably in the early eighties following on from the heady delights of the 1981 ashes series, I remember I was playing a game of Owzat against my friend Ian Foster, and in order to win, the game, and go home for my tea it turned out I needed six ‘sixes’ off of the last over, … now I am no Sir Garfield Sobers… but my first 3 rolls were all sixes… prompting accusations of cheating, and a meltdown in the game… and being told if we couldn’t play nicely we couldn’t play at all… and well I never found out if I would have rolled a further three sixes, ‘mums stopped play’…
And this came into my head when noticing a pattern answering forum posts, (my email has never worked with Our Umbraco, I do not get updates if anyone replies to one of my replies, so I have to search ‘Marc Goodson’ in order to see my latest posts, and see if there is a reply), and in doing so, the pattern I saw in the search results was when questions that were previously were white, got accepted, they turned green, and you could easily see three in a row… which got me thinking… could I get six in a row? And after 35yrs could I still beat Ian Foster? And well… I don’t know what that says about me but that became ‘my game’… I’d answer six questions each week, with the hope, when searching my name, of turning all six listed posts in a row ‘green’ (so for a time ‘Marc Goodson’ was probably the most searched forum phrase)
So you can see what I’ve done here right? I’ve made ‘forum answering’ into a fun non-competitive version of Cricket... Or have I?
I can stop at anytime
This has the markings of obsessive behaviour doesn’t it?, well we are developers… and for most of the year, I passed the time innocently playing this game, when I was on a train, or in hotel rooms, whilst away from home to deliver a training course... I’d fit in another 'karma kricket' over…
This trivial pursuit was working! In so many ways, I celebrated a century, waving my mouse in the air.. And my Karma score soon passed ‘Brian Lara’ proportions 500, what a knock this was and nudged up towards a credible 750...but I hit a snag, at best I was getting 2 maybe 3 accepted answers in a row - like doing the lottery the odds are a lot longer than you’d hope - I was carefully picking six from long list of previously unanswered questions but I wasn’t always finding six I knew the answer to (remember the arbitrary rules), and I needed six in order to try and get six in a row, otherwise what was the point?
So I started breaking my rules.
I ventured into answering questions I wasn’t quite sure of the answer…
... but I was so frightened about giving the wrong answer in public, that I would completely verify the answer first, by recreating the questioners’ problem in code, building the event system they were talking about, adding the custom menu item etc etc - I’d always have a version of Umbraco v-latest on my machine, ready to spin up and double double check my hunch of an answer.
These answers took ages to put together but had a correspondingly high acceptance rate due to the appreciation of the effort.
…but this triggered a further escalation…
I started answering questions that I had no idea of the answer nor really knew anything about..., sometimes I’d just replicate the issue, not find a solution, and not reply at all… or I'd dive into the Umbraco source and work it out - but the upshot of this was I was forcing myself into learning an awful lot about Umbraco, and because my learning was focussed on newish forum questions, and real-world problems - well just by reading those questions, I was finding out about bugs and problems with new releases, in real-time - which meant in my job at a popular Umbraco Gold Partner, I knew about issues well before our clients development teams raised them… like some sort of AI driven learning program… I gained insights into what people actually struggled with when developing with Umbraco and I fed these back into the training materials… and ideas for packages and plugins to solve these real-world pain points…
Enough Karma already
.. but then I noticed something… I’d pushed past 1,000 Karma now, breezed past, without noticing, objective achieved… but I carried on… telling myself it would be worth seeing if I could just get that six in a row , win the Test Match… defeat Ian Foster, then I could stop… but I knew the odds of that were huge.
It had never been about a high score, and other people had many thousands of Karma points, but an odd thought struck me, in Cricket you score a 100 runs... it’s a century, you raise your bat to acknowledge the crowd... A milestone has been passed in the match but what really really matters in a cricket career is your ‘average’ number of runs per innings...
… so I started calculating my Karma average, essentially I was playing a game of Cricket against myself.. Therefore the average number of Karma points per reply… was a way I could measure whether my Umbraco game was improving… if my average went up from one month to the next, then I could suppose on average - I was supplying better answers…
and also my earlier rule of 'not answering a question if I didn’t really know the answer' meant that actually ‘my average’, wasn’t too shoddy either, around 4.1… when actually between 2 and 3 was a typical score (yes I calculated lots of peoples averages) … but again for some mysterious arbitrary reason, I felt a ‘really’ good average you could be proud of, drop casually into conversations... would be around 6… this felt much more achievable than getting 6 in a row…
Ironically from a leaderboard perspective, this seems like a really good way to nullify accusations of gamification, because you can’t add hundreds of gamified ‘friendly’ replies to gain an extra point of karma... it would destroy your overall average…
MVP
My average began to creep up, I was awarded an MVP for ‘work in the forum’, it was the first year ‘without a public vote’, and where it wasn’t directly attributable to the total Karma score in the year… so as a number of people said at the time, “they’ve just given it to people they like”... it was nice to be liked - it wasn’t the aim to become an MVP, the aim was to sound legit when talking about the forum in the training… and of course to get six in a row or a Karma average of 6 points per reply...
… so great to pick up a trophy... but the important thing, my average was hovering at only 5.21 …
And I carried on...
… why couldn’t I stop?
… why didn’t people always mark answers as correct, when they were correct?
… I got 5 in a row on two occasions, including one run where it would have been six if the person hadn’t accepted their reply to say thanks instead of my reply with the correct answer
… why is it even possible to accept your own an swer as the answer :-)?
… why couldn’t I stop?
I’d created this arbitrary target to aim for, but why?, I remember having a conversation with Tim (@munkimagik) about addiction and negative reinforcement and read a bit about addiction on line.
If you think about it, the act of answering a question, and hoping that it helps… is a bit like putting a coin in a Fruit Machine… you have no control over the outcome… will it stay white or turn green? Who knows… woot, it’s turned green! That response felt good, you solved the problem for someone and it produces a little bit of dopamine reward in the brain… and you are one step closer to the unlikely jackpot of six in a row, if I keep answering questions… it will pay out… and oh god I realised I’m not playing Our Umbraco Owzat Cricket… I’m actually playing Our Umbraco Fruit Machine… and it’s bloody addictive!
Don't stop me now
So I stopped…my average was 6.02, I bloody should have had six in a row… I had nobody I could really celebrate this with… though I did tell Kevin Jump (who’s average was 4, but has now shot up to 6.4 over the last two years… almost like he’d really like to have a higher average than me, although I’d argue that it’s cheating to build popular packages that everybody uses, and then willfully name the config settings slightly oddly, just to try and generate low hanging forum fruit, that only you can answer - just to boost your Karma average… anyway as you can see from the above it's much more a battle with yourself!)
I stopped for a year
I still won MVP status, although this time for ‘Core contributions’…
...There is a part 2 to this… but I am running out of train journey...I have been writing this post on and off for the last three or four months... it was nearly the basis of a talk... but since Kevin Jump has posted his average online today on Twitter, and revealed there ‘is a game’ - I thought I’d publish what I have so far to at least explain what it is we are going on about… a ‘Karma average' origin story if you like.
But do let me know if you'd like me to continue 'next time'...Will Ian Foster be defeated? will there be a point to this? is Karma dead? will I make a song AND dance about it...
** turns out the karmanator is a lovely man, how wrong an impression you can possibly get out of context!