I'm generally in favour subdivisions, but there are many ways of doing it. E.g. you could have literal subforums, or just have more ways of sorting things. One idea is to split karma into subcategories. Get rid of karma as an indicator of "overall quality" of posts, and instead split into something like "quality_1", "quality_2", "quality_3", and have buttons for each category. The qualities could be any of "novelty", "altruism", "community", "urgent", "concise", etc.
The point is that karma can only capture something like the weighted average of the various qualities a post has to offer, and the more quality-dimensions posts can vary on (and the more people vary on what they care about), the more you gain from splitting the ranking system to start capturing several subsets of quality individually. Now people who care about varying dimensions of quality have an easier time self-matching to posts that score high on the dimensions they care about. It could potentially increase the both the quantity and diversity of what people read, due to high-variance strategy/market segmentation.
Another consideration in favour of such a system is that overall-quality karma can exacerbate suboptimal incentives. People want to "stay in the loop", so they read things in order to not feel left out of the discussion. And overall-quality karma generates stronger signals about what's "in the loop" than split-karma would. This is bad insofar as it skews people's reading incentives from what's optimal.



Extraordinary growth. How does it look on other metrics; e.g. numbers of posts and comments? Also, can you tell us what the growth rate has been per year? It's a bit hard to eyeball the graph. Thanks.
Thanks! All of our metrics are pretty well correlated with each other; you can see more information here.
Our primary metric is hours of engagement, which I didn't use for this post because the data doesn't stretch back as far. But the growth rate there is:
More about how this is calculated and our historical data can be found here.
Thanks!