could askbot use percentage-based values for karma (and other) thresholds?

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In addition to my comments above, I think another useful metric of positive activity is a moving average of the first derivative of karma with respect to time, and possibly other variables with respect to time (Recent Karma Velocity!). A moving average, however weighted, has some advantages (as long as you have that sliding window of time, it keeps people incentivized to keep contributing.) Perhaps a first step towards this would be to show the moving average of the first derivative (with site configurable time interval of course) in the karma history. Then perhaps draw up some proposals based upon observed behavior.

This can be experimented with, the easiest approach will be to re-assess the barriers automatically about once a day. It's a lot easier than hard-coding the logic into a whole bunch of tests and assertions of type assert_user_can_do_X.

If anyone is interested to make this work - one can write a management command that analyzes the karma of users and adjusts the settings accordingly.

Management commands are located in directory askbot/management/commands.

Available minimum rep settings are in askbot/conf/minimum_reputation.py.

Say if you want to update setting MIN_REP_TO_VOTE_UP you could code like:

#import askbot live settings
from askbot.conf import settings

settings.update('MIN_REP_TO_VOTE_UP', some_new_value)

The management command is then run via cron job:

python manage.py reassess_karma_barriers

It's best to try and see how this will work. It's not obvious how people will react to having some privileges come and go based on their "karma" standing relative to others.

This is a very interesting idea, but you would need to exclude a significant subset of the user base when calculating U.

Based on my own observations of various Q&A sites including StackExchange, askbot.org and my hosted site, the median karma/reputation amount (i.e. minimum amount of karma to be in the top 50%) tends to be 1.

For example, on askbot.org, as much as 60% of the user base have only 1 karma — it would take a lot of participation by people who posted once and never returned to raise the median karma above 1.

On really successful sites such as StackOverflow, the ratio is even less favorable; over 92% of StackOverflow users have 1 reputation (see this post for an explanation of how to interpret the chart).

To work around this problem, you could simply change the calculation to be the median karma of users who have more than 1 karma.

For askbot.org, if you were to exclude all 1-karma users from the median calculation, you'd end up probably with a U value between 50 and 60 (as of the time this was posted, although it would be interesting to see if this changes over time).