DAO forums are like town squares where lots of ideas are discussed and debated every day. At Karma, we give DAOs the ability to recognize contributors who are helping them realize their mission.
Karma's reputation system aggregates DAO contributor data from various sources such as Snapshot, on-chain voting contracts, Discord and Discourse forums, and POAPs. DAOs we work with value these metrics for various reasons. For some, voting is all that matters, but others want to better understand contributor activity on Discourse or Discord and assign appropriate weight to those metrics.
One of the features that differentiates Karma from other systems is our Discourse forum integration, which DAOs and contributors use to understand someone's contribution to the forum. Since contributions can be in the form of proposals created and discussed or just total threads and replies, the first question DAOs rightfully ask us is, “How do we prevent someone from accruing forum reputation by just spamming the forum with inconsequential posts?”
Over the last six months, we’ve made several enhancements to address this issue of contributors gaming the system. Here’s an explanation of some of our updates and the reasoning behind them:
DAOs can now assign different weights to different types of posts by contributors. If someone adds a new post in the temp-check or creates a new proposal, they can receive a higher score than a regular reply on a forum thread. This is important because it's much more time-consuming and impactful to create a thoughtful proposal of a new idea than it is to simply reply to a post.
We recently took our scoring enhancement even further. If any proposal on the forum goes to a vote (on Snapshot), that contributor can receive even more points or weight for their work. Anyone who’s worked in a DAO knows that it takes a lot of work to move a proposal from the idea stage in a forum to a vote. This enhancement recognizes that contributor’s effort.
Proposals in a forum need to be discussed, debated, and polished to survive, and there are many other contributors who assist in that process. DAOs can assign a different weight to discussions on proposals and distinguish them from other discussions in the forum.
Lastly, DAOs can assign a very small weight to anyone who posts general comments in the forum and contributes. This is useful for DAOs who are trying to bootstrap their forum community and want to encourage participation.
Karma continually seeks out ways to support DAOs and improve the management of their collective community and their contributor experience. If you’re a DAO interested in learning how our reputation system helps you understand your contributors and gives them an improved way to showcase their work, reach out to us at dao@showkarma.xyz or DM https://twitter.com/showkarma_xyz.
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