Lord_ByronWellllll kind of. Not really. The purple names receive greater promotion on facebook, instagram, and within this site. You have decided, and usually without controversy, that these are the best contributors NS have right now. Everything they poop out recieves comments like "Wow, that was great" "Well done" and most of those comments are from other red or purple names. And in my opinion most of those articles or other content are pretty good, but I've seen a few that aren't, and the same dick tugging that is done on the good ones still goes on with the bad ones. And guess, what, dick tugging equals more karma. With MOTM more karma means real world results.
I actually can really see your point, and frankly its our fault for not doing a better job of communicating exactly how the system works. Really its caused by the whole thing being in beta and us launching out bits and pieces at a time.
The whole thing is based off of the Karma system. The Karma system is a bit opaque, which we have done in the past for the purpose of not allowing people to game it. However, behind the scenes its calculating a ton of metrics. Lets walk through Journalism specifically, as its what we're discussing right now.
You can actually see your Journalist score on this page -
https://www.newschoolers.com/topkarma - as well, you can see the score of all Journalists on the site. This is calculated using a few numbers:
-Number of Articles
-Number of Views on Articles
-Article Rating
Note, its not straight addition and points. We use a pretty fancy calculation on the ratings to come up with what is called a
"Wilson Score Confidence interval". Essentially this gives us a very accurate number out of 10 that the hive mind feels about the article. Its scary accurate, and is very hard to game through malicious downvoting. We also police that quite heavily.
The key is how we use that against Number of articles and views. Its done as a multiplier, not as an addition. So it really equalizes in aggregate someone's ability to simply bomb with millions of posts.
The same thing happens with forum threads. Views and number of threads count - but your Karma Xchange works as a modifier. So someone like Eheath has way lower Karma than they could have, as there's years of super low Karma Xchange back history that obliterates the massive amounts of views that have amassed on videos.
One failure of the system which we're looking at addressing is the fact that it never decays your points - that is why you see the top rated lists populated with a ton of old-school members that have done a ton over the years. The only way to dethrone them overall is to wait for them to stop contributing, and then contribute as much as they did for the same amount of time in the past. This is a known failure of the system, and one which we're looking at ways to address.
That doesn't however affect MOTM. MOTM top 5 are chosen out of the biggest upwards mover in Karma over the last 30 days. So looking at your Karma graph will show you the kinds of bumps in your activity that can get you closer.
In terms of looping this all back to the purple program, its a mis-conception that everyone wrote one article and then bam we chose who was in the club or out of the club based on the whims of Mousseau and I. Each article in the application process was scored based on the overall Karma system performance, and then the spots in the program were filled by these people who had scored well.
'The Program' Refers to our monetization program. Just like on YouTube, we pushed it out with a gateway for becoming part of it. Same for Producers monetizing their videos. You have to have a certain level of contribution before we can let you in. I'd love to change this in the future, but managing the whole thing is very hard, and we have limited capacity to calculate the revshare that goes against the ads that run on the content.
In addition yes, we want to promote the good content on the site. However, the mis-conception is that you can't get that promotion too because you're name is blue. You actually could request an invite to the Journalist cult, state your interest, pitch some ideas and get every bit as involved and supported as the next person.
It is vital to understand we want to promote everything that is good on this site.
The application process for this specific program had to be done at a certain point. I'll admit it wasn't perfect, but we wanted to get the news monetization out in its infancy, so it can grow to be as successful as our Video Producer program. So yes, I'll give you that - there is a perception that Purple names get special treatment, and that they are selected by the old chronies club just like everywhere else. However, that perception is false, and the system is open and welcoming of new members.
I really do suggest if you have an idea, write it up! Every single day, every single month the system is calculating how people are doing, and the writers who stop participating will be replaced by those who are producing. Its going to be a living, breathing thing where we have a totally open content system.
Your contributions as a member qualify for the Yearbook, they qualify to make you the Journalist of the year (This year that person got an 8 page feature in the Yearbook, to go to the Olympics, and were paid well for both).
We need help with stuff around the site all the time, we have contracts and assignments that come up. We have Gear to be reviewed. Partaking as a member lets you move up the food chain and get offered this kind of stuff. We can't trust just any random person without any validation that they know what they're talking about.... which is why we built this system overall.
Lets split the right or wrong purple names discussion into another thread as Mousseau said, as this isn't the place for it. However, I'm more than happy to keep going on explaining how MOTM, Karma and the whole content system works.
TL;DR - We don't choose people, the Karma system does.
