We investigated how much karma from Community posts was distorting how much karma users had relative to what would happen if the Community section karma hadn’t been there, and relative to our personal “overrated-vs-underrated commenter” ratings. There was somewhat surprisingly not that much improvement from changing the weighting, so we decided to stop working on the project.
Ultimately, you shouldn’t take a user’s Forum karma has much correlation with their impact. It’s quite easy to have a lot of impact with low karma, or to be mostly a terminally online person who doesn’t get much object-level work done.
We investigated how much karma from Community posts was distorting how much karma users had relative to what would happen if the Community section karma hadn’t been there, and relative to our personal “overrated-vs-underrated commenter” ratings. There was somewhat surprisingly not that much improvement from changing the weighting, so we decided to stop working on the project.
Ultimately, you shouldn’t take a user’s Forum karma has much correlation with their impact. It’s quite easy to have a lot of impact with low karma, or to be mostly a terminally online person who doesn’t get much object-level work done.