the karma points system... logically broken?

[inventsekar]

Hi There Dear Splunkers, 

Pls no hard feelings or wrong understanding about this question.

from my team, i have been educating two three new freshers to this wonderful communities and teaching them how things work. 

when i show and explain users profiles to my freshers, automatically this question pops up: 
most of our splunkers are only "wanting the karma points",  "never giving karma points to others"

just like to understand your point of view, thats all, no hard feelings please. 

PS - my stats are here:
Karma Given-------2177
Karma Received ----484

[livehybrid]

Hi @inventsekar 

Its my understanding that typically it will be the Author of the post (the person asking the question) that I would expect to add Karma to a reply if it helps them - however after speaking to some community members in the past they did not really realise that adding karma to a post was "a thing" and so you may have seen some users such as myself adding a footer encouraging the author to add karma and/or accept a solution if the answer helps. 

To me, receiving karma gives me assurance that my answers on here are helping the people asking the questions - often answers get no feedback from the author so its hard to know if you've added value for them or not! For some reason authors rarely accept a solution - im not really sure why this is either...

I do sometimes find (as you might have seen from your last thread) that you can get the same answer from 3 different people...I generally try not to reply if I'm going to say the same thing as someone who has already answered, however if I have additional points/context/clarity to make then I will post even if some of the answer is the same (e.g. posting a link to the relevant documentation to backup someone else's previous answer). On the other hand, I have seen a pattern of users who will literally say the exact same thing (even sometimes using sample queries I have written) to answer the question, ultimately there isnt much we can do about that but I have noticed that sometimes their post will be accepted as a solution which is obviously a little frustrating when you've already put the effort in..

From what I can tell there are a few different personas on here:

* The Asker - Someone who needs help from the community on a specific problem, or wants to learn more about a particular challenge or area. These users will typically leave a karma for replies and thus give a relatively small number of karma and receive none (or very few)

* The Answerer - Someone who generally spends their time only responding to new answers that come into the forum - these users typically receive a higher number of karma and leave much fewer as their responses are typically for the purpose of helping others or participating in a conversation. Occasionally these users will like other answers in the same thread as their own, for example if another user highlights issues with the answer they have given or gives a better way of achieving something - I find myself giving karma where someone has challenged my response or provided a good alternative view which is a way for me to acknowledge that they have helped me.

* The Browser - Someone who doesnt always provide answers, but spends time reading other questions/answers within the community - these users often do so to learn about other people's challenges or issues to help them learn troubleshooting techniques or more detail about certain aspects of Splunk. 

Of course, there may be others that I have missed, and there are probably users who do a mixture of all of these - Personally I get a 'buzz' from being able to answer questions that challenge me and will often go to great lengths to try and provide an answer (Its not unusual for me to spend an hour putting together some testing/data/scenario) to help answer a specific question - so therefore receiving karma for me is how I justify my investment into the community, but I totally understand that different people have different views on this kind of thing!

I'd be interested to see what other people think though! 

Will