First of all, I'm new here and know almost nothing about how karma currently works. What I know is pretty much based on reading this thread. Thus read my opinion for what it's worth or skip it.





Ultimate purpose of the system should be to maximize it's benefit to the community.


Most of the discussion seem to center around distributing the “stuff” from Nokia fairly. To me that still sounds like proximate argument. It might be nice to have a system that distributes loot in a way that doesn't cause conflict amongst the looters, but is it the best basis for system that helps Maemo most? Equal personal effort doesn't necessarily, or even likely, equate equal benefit to the community.


For example, this noob with handle “Rauha” has managed to collect 151 points of karma in few months. So he would already have 75% of karma required for that big N900 discount. He has voted on few brainstorms, made some post helping people with technical problems and so forth, but 90+% of his karma seems to come from witty comments and spamming the board about Nokia related news (just two examples, trust me there are plenty more of those). Now, he has spent relatively lot of time making those post and the effort might be roughly equal to, for example, developing simple desktop widget for N900. Yet, the community benefits from that widget vastly more than from those posts. By rewarding Rauha the community isn't ultimately looking out for it's own benefit, even if it's rewarding equal effort.


That is not even taking into account the schizophrenic nature of designing a fair rewarding system, which has the community controlling how the points are distributed and Nokia deciding how distributed points are rewarded. Nokia's ultimate motivation is always to to maximize profits for it's shareholders. So we have supposedly fair rewarding system that has the two different stages with different purposes and motivations. Those two might align in many case but not always.




Short version:
Basis of the the system should be the benefit to community, especially since our definition of fairness doesn't necessarily meet with rewarders definition of fairness.