Habrahabr

Habrahabr (Russian: Хабрахабр) is a Russian collaborative blog about IT, Computer science and anything related to the Internet, owned by Thematic Media.^[2]

Habrahabr was founded in June 2006.

In 2007, Habrahabr won in two nominations at the ROTOR (Russian: РОТОР): Discovery of the Year (Russian: Открытие года) and Online Community of the Year (Russian: Интернет-сообщество года). Also, the website's author, Denis Kryuchkov, won in nomination Producer of the Year (Russian: Продюсер года). In 2009, the website again won in nomination Online Community of the Year.

Mechanisms

Karma

The karma is a value assigned to each user. It can be changed by other users (and no one but them). It is a form of community-driven moderation, since the karma level impacts the user's privileges.

The starting point of karma for new users is 0.00, although since Habrahabr had become an invitation-only resource, newly invited users get a first “plus” from the inviter.

A user who has a karma of at least 5 is able to contribute to someone’s else karma value, increasing or decreasing its value by 1. The contribution can be changed later. The number of karma changes per day is limited with one's own karma value (for example, a user with 7.00 can vote 7 times a day).

Reasons for changing Karma vary. Most “pluses” are received for good posts, useful or humorous comments and other actions in good standing. “Minuses” may be result of offence, spam or other bad actions. Some users tend to change Karma in holywar purposes (say, Chrome supporters may give “minuses” to those who stated they will never leave Firefox).

To publish posts, one must have a positive karma value. This way, spammers, poor writers and the like are quickly squeezed out by the community.

With a positive karma value, you are also allowed to use some HTML in your comments. For users with a negative karma, comments are text-only, and their rate is limited to one per 5 minutes.

When the karma value is above 5, you can alter the karma of other users; voting for comments is available from a karma value of 2.00.

Upon reaching 50 points of Karma, the user is granted 5 invites to invite others. This happens only once, with breaking the barrier. If Karma drops below 50 and then rises above 50 again, no new invitations are given.

Rating

The rating is also a value assigned to each user. Rating depends on Karma, positive and negative votes of other users for posts and comments. However, the exact formula is unknown.

Voting for topics and comments

Voting for topics and comments helps users show their opinion about them.

Using this tool users can determine the importance of a subject, thus making a new topic appear on the main page or "unhabr" it.

References