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
I think it would be better to have like a currency system where posts that are kept alive the longest trigger points, not just how many people upvote them. But then, you should be able to use those points to do something instead of hoarding them like a dragon’s treasure or maybe turn them in to awards. If OTHER people give you awards, that’s what you should have on display, not just how many upvotes you had. This would also give you more points for helping smaller communities create meaningful content instead of what’s popular.
I’m against any kind of global user ranking.
It makes sense to rank content, but ranking users just begs abuse of the system. There’s always those that will try to farm the system resulting in lower quality content. It’s also an attack vector for bots.
I don’t miss the “karma” aspect one bit here. Rate my post quality, not me. On the other hand, tools for ranking users privately could be helpful. In other words a personal ranking for your eyes only would be fine.
I agree. I personally found the system was far too addictive, in the Cookie Clicker kind of way of “bigger number = happy”. I sometimes find myself missing it almost, only to remember that it’s worthless.
It also means I can more freely share my actual opinions, without that reflecting on some sort of global score if people generally dislike said opinion.
I think voting has the potential to be very useful but what we want to move away from is the reactionary “I disagree with you / dislike your post, so downvote”
One experiment I would like to see is requiring a reason when downvoting. Factually incorrect, violates this magazine’s civility code, trolling, etc. Some reasons might have overlap with the report feature, so a downvote for e.g. illegal content might automatically notify the moderators as well. This might be contingent on a feature that can impose restrictions for abuse of the report feature.
Although it is already relatively easy for anyone to notice when an account is blanket downvoting a thread. In theory, it’s already a bit easier for users to sniff out bad actors because they’ll either have a clear pattern of misbehavior or a conspicuous lack of account age or participation
I like the idea of giving more information, however I’d say for both upvotes and downvotes. Me, as a user, I want to do things as quick as possible, so I’d say the action of upvoting/downvoting while giving more information should be embed into a quick wheel.
I like your comment, long press upvote and then select why in the categories. The same for downvoting
I was thinking maybe some kind of ranking system like Street Fighter 6?
I know everyone seems to be hating karma but I do like that dopamine release. Ofx it will get abused… but what if there are just tiers, rather than seeing a number go up.
And at the highest tier, it doesn’t matter anymore. That was you can see who is most active and it kind of gives just a bit of prestige. Furthermore, you won’t see a number going up forever, so after awhile it’s not like you want to keep gaming the system to see the number go up. But at the same time you can feel some some of progression.
Anyways, it’s just a random thought I had as I am grinding on SF6 today haha. I could easily do without karma but it’s just a thought.
Personally i like to call em WIP. Worthless internet points. Just to be clear i cherish my WIP. I would never disrespect my WIP. That’s just my name for it.
One feature I liked a lot from RES was the ability to tag users, which I used to flag users and remember who they are and what their general opinions are on issues. It made arguing more interesting since I didn’t have to rerun over the same old conflicts with people who will never budge on certain issues.
Or on the more positive side flair people who are really helpful . And flag them once then start to see that whenever they post something helpful it’s the same person. Funny thing is I would still never remember the username. Flair would just be like helpful person who said how to fix settings.
Personally I think there shouldn’t be anything like it at all , that stuff should only be visible to you and nobody else . Didn’t stop reddit from becoming toxic cesspit . But once its implemented it’s hard to remove w/o serious consequnces . Just look at youtube dislikes .
Worst thing about karma system, r/assistance has minimum karma requirement which I think is shitty to peops who need help
People like big numbers. Karma systems exist because they encourage posting and engagement. Stifling growth because Karma is toxic is bad for everyone in the long run. What matters is growth.
Subs should be able to force sort by controversial for comments and/or posts.
Any damn fool can come up with comments that are universally approved of, or universally hated. They aren’t interesting.
The phrase ‘trivially true’ applies - “This crime was a bad thing, and the people responsible shouldn’t have done it! I am very angry at them!” may be emotionally satisfying to say or to cheer on, but it doesn’t add a damn thing to the conversation, any more than “hur hur suck it libruls” does.
There isn’t a term for the inverse of ragebait, but there needs to be. All the le reddit moments - the tedious meme-chains, forced in-jokes, etc.
For subs where you want interesting discussion, you want to sort both to the bottom. It’s the posts that divide opinions that are worth talking about, almost by definition. If a post has a thousand votes but the total is close to zero, well hey, that’s probably worth seeing and engaging wth.
Let people vote with their heart, use upvotes/downvotes however the fuck they want to instead of constantly nagging and whining about it - and then use that to detect and de-prioritise mediocrity.
It wouldn’t be appropriate for all subs, but for some places, I think it’d be a huge improvement.
I really like this solution. Instead of making things more complicated for users or trying to control their input, observe their natural behavior and then respond to it.
Judging by the controversial comments on Reddit, I don’t know if I want to engage with 50/50 up/downvotes for any significant amount of time. I think a 60/40 ratio might be a bit more palatable while still keeping it engaging. I’m not convinced an algorithm like this is the best course of action though.
Top 3 most upvoted comments always being unfunny puns was getting insufferable on Reddit. Everyone was trying to be a fucking comedian - that’s what was popular and got upvotes.
The early Reddit you could have long, interesting arguments with people and you’d both be getting upvoted because you’re both making interesting points.
It honestly feels like my brain is waking up from a digital coma since coming to Lemmy from Reddit. My own personality and opinions don’t feel pointlessly supressed and sanitised.
Making a controversial statement for attention is just as easy. What you are proposing would be a perfect environment for trolls.
Not a statement that makes people angry, because that would get ignored or downvoted. One that garners both positive and negative reactions in equal measure. That’s a lot harder to engineer; you need to look at both sides and walk the line between, pretty much getting to the crux of the issue. If the crowd can’t decide whether they agree or disagree, then to me that means it bears looking at more closely.
Ah, I see. That makes sense.
A blockchain might be fun as long as there is no way of converting it into money. Like just a ledger of how much “karma” everyone gets
Advogato reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric
I really like this karma method, but I’m curious about what led the site to going down the tubes for a bit there. Was that in any way a byproduct of the karma system, or other issues entirely?
Major UI changes. It was so hates that a small group forked the code and started Soylent news.org
To be fair, the UI changes were rather bad.
Why did Slashdot go down the tubes? Nothing to do with moderation, just management screwups similar to the ones Reddit has had a few times. Slashdot was sort of a 1990’s version of Reddit. It was sold a few different times and the new owners tended to try to impose unpopular changes. Those did usually get rolled back.
Re the moderation system itself, I suspect it went through a lot of iterations. Slashdot was die-hard about free speech so had tons of trolls and spammers, but made the karma system work well enough that you could keep away from the trolling unless you chose to browse at -1. I think -2 was added sometime later when -1 was seen as not low enough. Generally you could do ok by browsing at +3. They asked for mods to browse at -1 so that you could upvote stuff that was downvoted wrongly.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Peer_moderation
It says they killed off anonymous posting in 2019, oh well. I had always thought that was a good feature despite the crap that got posted that way.
There were a bunch of reasons people left. Personally, I thought the slashdot site redesign really sucked. They ruined the comment section. It was harder to follow comments and it seemed the amount of comments shown varied at random. Sometimes you would only see high rated comments, other times it showed all, even the troll comments. It was weird. And the look of the design was weird. Oversized margins that forced more scrolling. There were a few other things I didn’t like, but those were negligible.
There was also the sourceforge drama where slashdot buried negative articles about sourceforge, its sister company. Hard to trust a site much after.
Overall, its still usable. I still stop in once in a while to read tech news, but that’s it. Those stop ins are getting less and less, too. HN is my main go to for tech stuff.
I couldn’t care less about karma, what I really want is a way to see what I upvote, otherwise I feel that what I upvote is meaningless (for myself, I like to boost content that I like though).
As a moderator, looking at karma is one of the ways we can automate the blocking of potentially unwanted content.
Any shortcut method of mimicking reputation can be and thus will be abused, so they’re all toxic.
The only sure way to do it is the good old-fashioned way - by name recognition - actual, earned “reputation.”
The way it used to work on all forums and still does on some smaller ones is that people just read posts and write their own posts and over time they come to recognize each other’s names and associate them with some impression of each individual’s value as a poster.
And yes - that’s not very effective in gigantic forums, and it’s not accessible to newcomers. You need a relatively small group of posters and new people have to pay attention in order to figure out who are the better or worse posters. That’s just the way it is, and is one of the problems with gigantic forums.
I’m not a fan of this because the main thing I liked about Reddit over all the other various “social media” was that I didn’t have to try to recognize names. Names didn’t matter, it was all about the conversation and the subject matter. If a post or comment was good I liked it, if it was bad I disliked it, and I moved on.
RES kept track of my personal like/dislike sum for each individual, perhaps since upvotes/downvotes aren’t anonymous here in the Fediverse it’d be more straightforward to do that and show that to each user.
@[email protected] I actively jam this by changing my name every so often like a molting arthropod
Yeah, I’ve seen people do that on Reddit too. It’s not really my thing, I’m fine with people recognizing me if they want to. If someone just can’t stand me then I encourage them to block me. Though preferably not after firing off a final “gotcha” comment at me and then blocking me so I can’t respond (that’s the most annoying thing about Reddit’s blocking system, I don’t know how the Fediverse handles that sort of thing yet).
Yes, this.
It’s not like karma worked well as a reputation system, anyway. In a large forum, all it points to is that you were lucky or entertaining. It says nothing a out whether you’re actually a positive influence on a space.
Post the same post as 36 other people, but because if random chance yours gets chosen to float to the top? Co gratulations, you have a severe positive karma score for life for doing nothing different from those who got nothing.
Dunk on people in a way that others think is entertaining or deserved? Bam, you’re swimming in positive reputation for being an asshole.
It doesn’t create healthy space. It doesn’t denote that you’re a net benefit to a communal space. It’s not even proportionate to how well you’re known.
It’s just gamed fake internet points.
by name recognition - actual, earned “reputation.”
That…is going to mean most people are untrustworthy after a few months. You won’t recognize most people you speak to.
Keep in mind forums also usually only had maybe a 100 people at the most. We’re dealing with potentially thousands in one thread.
I also find it really strange you gave that as “The Only Way”, then by the end said that it doesn’t really apply here.
Karma should have a half-life, so it’s not a forever thing. Have each karma point lose half of its value every three days. Makes it more transitory.
But what if the thread is old and someone came across it from google looking for information?
The thread doesn’t get deleted - the user just loses the karma. So you post something helpful, it gets a ton of upvotes, and those votes expire over time. I come along, find your post via Google, and upvote you, that is a fresh upvote and counts, until it ultimately expires in six months, weeks, whatever, or gets a halflife as @[email protected] said.
Score the posts, not the individuals. Attaching imaginary points to any kind of activity instantly turns it into a competition.
Instead, any scoring should focus on actual content, which is basically what the up/down vote is.
I like this, and I also remember forums where you knew that that type was good but weird, that one was nice but not very good etc etc. You had to build your “real” reputation because it was an enouy small space.
I hope Reddit will explode and create gazillions of normal sized subs…