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.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
72 points (88.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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Honestly, I find the entire system annoying and counter to fostering real discussions.
If you go to a party, it's not like people in the room have tags over their heads which say "trustworthy," "troll," "crazy," or whatever else. You have to make up your own mind based on your interactions and (hopefully) use of critical thinking to decide if someone you are talking with is worth your time.
If I don't want to take the time to read anything which might offend me, put me off, make me uncomfortable, challenge me, or just in some way be contrary to my world view then frankly, online forums would not be the spaces in which I would be reading things.
I believe that everyone has a point of view that can have value in some way, if only to illustrate that "negative" or "contrary to me" view and people exist around me. They have voices to contribute. Deciding if their contributions are valuable enough to award them a positive or negative "Reputation" is not an abstract thing. A true reputation takes time to build in the real world. It is earned for better or for worse, by actions people take over time not by some arbitrary number farmed by a bot posting cat memes 24/7 or whatever, or posting viewpoints sure to garner upvotes because like minded people are the only ones replying.
This tends to assume that each individual is a sincere member of a conversation, but real parties also don't have swarms of robots and clones wearing disguises coming in to try to destroy your house. User reducing visibility is a strong first-line defense against bad actors that doesn't require 24/7 moderators. If you poke through big, popular Facebook pages, like the NYT, and look through their comment sections, you'll often find a ton of copy-pasted spam, scams, etc. ("this psychic saved my marriage! this accountant made me a bitcoin millionaire!") I don't believe the up/down system can be the only way to preserve the ability for people to have conversations, but we shouldn't forget what problems these systems were created to solve.
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MeowMeowBeenz would work wonders.
What is that?
Every system that can be thought of (and has been suggested here) might sound great but when implemented at scale will no doubt prove to be open to abuse and require an army of mods to oversee. Otherwise every multi-million dollar social media company would have implemented it already.
Upvotes and downvotes and cumulative scores kind of do the job well enough that that’s what we keep ending up with.
That being said though, I would be interested in seeing a system where each downvote you make also counts against your own karma to discourage profligate use of the downvote to mean “I have a different opinion but can’t express it here”.
I think the idea of sacrificing your own “good boi points” to downvote a post bring a new layer of complexity. For sure, the hive-mind effect would be attenuated if users had to sacrifice their own “points”, and, probably, the downvoting as a whole would be less used. What do you guys think about how the use of the downvote would change?
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I think a reputation system is important, though reddit's current karma implementation is bad, there needs to be a method of identifying bad actors and forum shifters.
One refinement over karma could be that the score is kept only by community and should reflect that users contribution to the community.
Simple upvotes and downvotes also don't allow for nuance, replace them with a Buzzfeed like tag system (yes I know we all hate the site for its content but its tag system if used properly could be pretty powerful.
So instead of 'up' and 'down', you have a clickable emoji-menu like list of tags like 'interesting', 'boring', 'funny', 'WTF!?', 'Quality', 'Trash', 'Educational', 'CAT', etc...
So the reputation score for the community isn't just a flat number, rather it will tell you the kind of content a person posts over time, and doesn't carry just flat positive or negative connotation.
I mean the king of Catposting may have massive reputation in meme subs with high ranks in tags for 'Funny', 'Cute', and 'CAT' though that might not be the case if they participate in say a chemistry QnA community.
As these scores are created over time based on each users contributions (post AND comment reputation is the same thing) to the sub as scored by other people's tag selections for that users posts. The more it aligns with the community, the greater their contribution score.
Does this mean that toxic communities can form that exclude people based on reputation tags that the toxic community detests?
Unfortunately yes, that is one of the flaws of the system.
THOUGH
The fact it is contained by community means that a high rep person in an anti-trans community will not have any carryover reputation when joining a community they wish to brigade or degrade the quality of content, and their tag history will make it easy to determine their genuine engagement.
Reddit's system is bad because the people who are meant to safeguard it don't.
Moderators of several big subs just don't care if people karma farm (e.g. bots who use their subs to build karma and a reputation to spam in other subs). Admin have gone on record saying subs like 'Freekarma4u' are fine because some subs have implemented minimum karma requirements. Tools which the admins gave mods to help control activity in their sub.
of course the biggest offender is users who can't be bothered to use the system with nuance. Did that person reply in a way that wasn't 100% cheerleading everything i Just said? downvote brigade!
The system works fine in theory, the problem is far too many people either ignore it or misuse it.
Tagging isn't very helpful. We've seen that in action on Steam reviews.
I think the only way to really make this work is to have a crowdsourced safeguard system that doesn't rely on individuals.
Personally I think tagging is the only thing that can work, because it is a multi axis upvote downvote system that simultaneously creates metadata that isn't tied to user identity.
The reason it DOESN'T work on Steam reviews is that bad actors are not punished for 'joke' tags, and a persistent reputation system per user would fix that.
When content gets a lot of views and engagement, the outlier engagement is easily identified, i.e. 'joke' tags, and a temporary decrement on that users's 'community power' can be enacted making each of the tags they use count for less than an average user.
The opposite is true, people who frequently tag useful tags early can be identified, and given more community power, where their tags are worth temporarily slightly more than the average user.
To keep 'community royalty' from forming, the extra community power for good tags decreases to normal over time, meaning that only through consistent and frequent community engagement can 'super users' maintain their power, meaing if they start to abuse it the backlash will decrement their community power back to a normal user quickly.
With the explosion of forum manipulation and AI chatbots we NEED a better way, and the only way we are going to get there is trying new things.
Well,. here's a new thing to try.
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Non-algorithmic ordering, auto-collapse replies after a certain user-preferred setting.
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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.
What would you think about actual levels that the users could have and increase as they participate in conversations. That would not take into account the quality of the posts tho
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.