Yes, because he recognizes that if you just did a naive count of... total comment/post net upvotes per user, per week, he would probably just win every week.

The OP here suggests doing this kind of thing democratically, ie, via discussion and nomination, every week.

That seems like a lot of engagement just for users to sort of meta commentate, to me, so I'm kind of skeptical of doing it weekly, via discussion, and I'm going off of what I think db0's idea is, which would be to automate this via basically making some kind of bot and then some kind of additional script/ruleset/metrics.

I'm not quite sure what the exact rules, or the precise goal of those rules should be, though.

I think the idea of some kind of cool down for users only being able to win the award once in some timeframe is good, as that would let people know its not just a straightup mass popularity contest.

Even if stamets wasn't hardcoded out of that, he'd only win once every 6 weeks, by that very basic rule.

Maybe you could weight a week timeframe of a user's post/comment votes by that same user's total lifetime post/comment votes, or the average score of them, so that the whole thing is then comparing users by basically what would show up in their own 'top' comments/posts, trying to find which db0 user had the most disproportionately 'good' post, or cumulative week of posts/comments, by the user's own standards?

Or, you could do a kind of... mean lifetime post/comment score for all db0 users, over all lifetime of all users, as the basis for that metric.

Or, do that 'global' average, but on a weekly, rolling basis, not lifetime.

I dunno, I'm a stats dork just musing about how there are many, many ways you could try to do this via an automated ruleset, and also trying to mention that if you do do this, you have to be very, very conscious of the meta effects it could have... a whole lot of people like lemmy because it isn't as much of a hivemind/algo driven social space, so you probably don't want to accidentally re-invent something like reddit or tiktok in terms of gamifying social interaction.

EDIT:

Also, ... Stamuel? Like... as Sam is to Samuel?

Haven't heard that before, but that's pretty funny, lol.

Stamothy! You're clogging up the lemmy tubes again! Post more fiber!