User blog comment:Toughpigs/Wikia's new Forum demo/@comment-1025281-20120726142406/@comment-10370-20120726204143

Kudos is an experiment right now. The main goal is for it to be an "LOL-killer" -- giving people the ability to express appreciation for something that's smart, interesting or funny without having to post "me too!" or "that was great!"

We don't know how that's going to play out yet, and that's why we built it at this early stage for the project -- so people could play with it and see how it feels.

The same is true for the "Highlight" function, which admins can use to give a one-time notification for an important thread to every logged-in person who visits the wiki. We want people to play with it, so we can see if it makes sense and is helpful.

If it turns out that those elements don't make sense, lead to a bad outcome or don't make a difference, then there's plenty of time to fix, rethink or drop them. If it turns out that they're helpful and used a lot, then we can think of ways to build on that.

Using these early versions to test out the more experimental ideas means that we're front-loading some of the weird stuff. There are a lot of things that we know for sure that we'll want -- like polls, community-editable space and quoting -- that we're saving for a little bit later because we won't need as much time to figure out if they're helpful.