Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
It’s very easily abused. Does Karma affect article and comment visibility on Reddit? I don’t know the details, but if so I’d suggest that it not do so here. Maybe just have it be a number calculated from boosts, upvotes and downvotes that you can see on the profile if you are a mod trying to determine if someone tends to troll, but not something that has any affect on whether or not your stuff is displayed.
Sort of.
On reddit, moderators can set minimum karma thresholds to control who can post in the sub, admins can use it to control who posts anywhere sitewide.
For example, new users who make a contentious statement and get down voted for it will suddenly find themselves rate limited for posting comments. They could be in the middle of an exchange where the other user is firing back responses, but then suddenly they are restricted to making one post every few minutes in the sub.
Admin can also use that to automate things like shadow banning.
Some moderators put thresholds on karma for an account to post, but the thresholds are always very low – they are basically ways to work around open registration to get rid of throwaway account trolls and bots.
The downside is that this created an incentive to build bots capable of generating karma in order to become accounts that could spam/scam. The most common method was the repost bots, that would just copy and paste a comment from somewhere else in the thread or a post from months ago. That was annoying.
The actual “better system” is to just not have open registration and/or have active moderators that quickly get rid of trolls and bots. All the karma/reputation-based stuff is just heuristics to make that job a bit easier. No reason to rethink the wheel here.