I don't understand the design goals here. Why would you incentivize users to maximize for the highest possible number of posts that can be of as low quality as necessary so long as they don't get you banned?

You have a karma system. You can do way better if you want to incentivize genuine engagement towards building a community. You have all the tools to do so. This is just baffling.

Forgive me for prying, but I just couldn't help myself given that this sort of thing is what I'm paid to analyze on a day-to-day basis

Excuse me, I mistyped: Why is level ~= constant * ln(# of comments)?

You are deliberately meant to be confused. This is by design. Site works as intended.

So bad incentives are meant to confuse users while actively worsening the user experience? Sounds like a great plan 5head
only it really isn't that hard to figure out if you have two brain cells to rub together.
But, I guess if that's what was intended that ought to tell me all I need to know, huh?

The system has some pros and cons. It is mostly designed to mess with spammers.

It would only benefit the smart ones

And deter most users who would otherwise be willing to become minor beneficial participants of a user community

like, this only bothers me because I *like* this site, y'know? I want it to do well and be as useful as possible, but then I see all these terrible design decisions and I wonder what the owner is even getting out of hosting this

It has troubled me before, I still need to get people to create character tags for me because I don't comment alot despite having posted a lot of art to the site. But it's a solution, and people are usually nice about doing that for me, so it's not the end of the world lol.

I guess I agree that for someone like me, who doesn't browse as much as I post, having posting-related things held behind commenting, is pretty troubling.