Every vote counts, some just count more now

One of the first things I did at DOM was to enable users to start accumulating Karma. Initially this added some information to each user's profile, but didn't do much else. Today, that karma actually started having an impact. Users with more that 20 karma points who rate videos will have that rating count twice. Users with more than 30 karma points will have their ratings count 3 times. 40+, 4 times and 50 or more will count a maximum of 5 times. This "bonus multiplier" only happens when you rate a video for the the first time. Normally, authenticated users can only rate a video once. Rating it again simply changes your initial rating. To enable users with karma to re-rate their videos, we've enable the cancel rating button. Clicking that will delete your initial vote and allow you to vote again with your "bonus multiplier". When your karma expires, your rating will revert back to only counting once.

Users can earn karma by doing a variety of things on the Denver Open Media website including ingesting video, blogging, commenting and even rating videos. We will continue to tweak the amount of karma you get for each of these things and how long that karma last before it expires.

The basic idea is that active users get more control over what airs.

The other thing that will happen this week is that anonymous ratings will count less. Currently anonymous users can rate a video once every 24 hours per IP address. Unfortunately, several users take advantage of that feature to skew the voting. The reason the anonymous rating feature is enabled at all is some users share a single, public IP address. It was never intended to allow someone to vote for the same videos every 24 hours. If we didn't allow multiple ratings from the same IP address at all, 4 people who use a single wireless router to connect to the internet at home or at work would only get 1 vote. The compromise we came up with will limit votes from a single IP to 10 ratings per video. As new anonymous users vote with the same IP address, the oldest anonymous rating is deleted.

I'm looking forward to seeing the change to how we handle anonymous ratings combined with the "bonus multiplier" users with karma get impacts what airs.

Let me know what you think of the changes.

UPDATE: We've changed the system so that it now only allows 10 votes per IP on ANY video. This was because as I was purging votes I noticed that some IP addresses were rating the same videos with 5 stars every 24 hours and then rating the other videos in their theme 1 or 2 stars. This isn't exactly cheating, but it definitely wasn't in the spirit of Denver Open Media or public access in general. You should feel free to rate a video a 2 if you don't like it, but rating it a 2 and your video a 5 so that your video airs more often is just wrong.