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
That real question is, what problem are we trying to solve? Then we can go from there.
Good point, take my:
handshake, pat on the back, slightly too long hug point thingy.
In wondering about that myself. What is the problem?
Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.
This is why it’s useful at the account level. It’s also useful at the post level in order to build a sorting algorithm which raises the most engaging/important/interesting submissions to the top. Within a community it is important to help define what that community is - irrelevant and low effort content is suppressed and relevant/high-effort gets boosted. Moderators can enforce this by just removing and pinning too, but that’s almost always too unilateral, and the voting system is generally better because it’s expected that then you get a representation of how people in that community feel about it. It’s a good system.
I can imagine some tweaks to help improve how karma is implemented:
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Use Bayesan Inference to produce a ‘shit/shinola score’ for contributors instead simple up/down vote totals
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Experiment with different recency biases for the score; you can trust that people will change over time
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Generally figure out what you’ll be using karma for and make sure you have a way to measure how well it’s working
I’ve googled Bayesan Interference, however I don’t understand what you meant by it. Could you elaborate please :)
Here is a good general explanation of Bayesian inference.
I think @jayrhacker@kbin.social is suggesting using such techniques to predict “troll” or “not troll” given the posting history/removed comments/etc. My personal thought is that whatever system replaces karma, it should be understandable to the typical user. I think its possible Bayesian inference could be used in developing the system, but the end system should be explainable without it.
Thanks for the link. To anyone that does’t know about Bayesian inference, do check it out!
Now I have an existencial crisis thanks to the video 😂 the funny part is that thats the same thing used to detect spam email…
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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.
What we have right now in Lemmy strikes the current balance IMO. Individual comments are upvoted/downvoted. But no cumulative score.
which is the right thing, judge the opinion not the person
We should keep it as is. Having an account score just amplifies a big issue with sm. The content should be in focus, not the people posting. A relevant comment should be hightened because it itself is good. In the same way we shouldn’t judge something because the user has a low karma, but because the content is bad.
The idea behind something keeping a score on a profile is good, but it doesn’t work as intended in practice. People will farm in whatever way they need to get a moral highground. Not having such a scoring system will be a good way to reduce the incentive to copy/paste content from others.
No system. The goal isn’t Reddit 2, it’s a federated link aggregator.
What about the same system, but it shows both upvotes and downvotes?
I’d prefer that. 2600 up and 2500 down is really different than 105 up and 5 down
Tbf you can probably tell the actual numbers by looking at the % reddit shows in the corner, but that’s not very intuitive
You can do that for Reddit posts but can you also see it for comments? It wasn’t shown in my client app but perhaps it’s visible elsewhere.
Web of trust. The biggest thing missing from most attempts to build social networks so far. A few sites did very weak versions, like Slashdot/s friend/foe/fan/freak rating system.
Let me subscribe, upvote, downvote, filter, etc specific content. Let me trust (or negative-trust) other users (think of it like “friend” or “block”, in simple terms)
Then, and this is the key… let me apply filters based on the sub/up/down/filter/etc actions of the people I trust, and the people they trust, etc, with diminishing returns as it gets farther away and based on how much people trust each other.
Finally, when I see problematic content, let me see the chain of trust that exposed me to it. If I trust you and you trust a Nazi, I may or may not spend time trying to convince you to un-trust that person, but if you fail or refuse then I can un-trust you to get Nazi(s) out of my feed.
Posts should just be upvoted and downvoted with no credit given to the person who posted. Same goes for comments. In my opinion, upvoting and downvoting should just help the user find the most relevant information. Content that people upvote is the most seen. Content that people downvote is the least seen. Posters and commenters stay on an equal footing with no points system.
Maybe we could still have karma, but display it as a ratio of good:bad karma or something? Active user and most of your interactions get upvoted, green dot. New user or not active for a while? Gray dot. Established user and all your content gets downvoted all the time, red dot.
Get banned from 50+ subreddits? Your color dot gets changed to a picture of u/spez.
best idea I have heard thus far
It provides other users with an at a glance idea of your reputation, without chasing a “high score”. Could always rank users based on up/down votes, as I said, but limit the range so that as long as you’ve been active for a few months and aren’t a douchebag, your score will be maxed out.
Karma and votes should stay but be hidden to other users. Karma is a good way to detect bots and trolls, but just admins and moderators should see it to act on them if needed. And up/down votes should be hidden too because of the hive mind phenomenon that it produces (Experienced on Reddit): often, the funny or sassy or apparently clever comment gets upvoted and sometimes, the comment with knowledge about the post gets downvoted because the first joke was funny. Many people may not have an opinion about the issue but upvote the funny guy and downvotes the real answer just following the hive. Hiding it, each person reading must decide by themselves if they upvote or downvote a comment.
Prizes and awards could maybe stay, not sure
often, the funny or sassy or apparently clever comment gets upvoted and sometimes, the comment with knowledge about the post gets downvoted because the first joke was funny
This is why I like the option of having different vote categories with corresponding sort options. Sometimes I’m specifically looking for information, sometimes I’m just killing some time and don’t mind the fun.
Prizes and awards could maybe stay, not sure
They should be used to fund the servers.
In combination with invisible vote scores and no karma it would be a good way to highlight great content without feeding into dopamine addiction.
my take: up only, no down, per-post only, no account karma. if someone is repeatedly a problem mods can show them the door.
karma systems have been around forever allegedly to decrease mod/admin workload managing users by having them “self moderate” and that has NEVER been the actual effect - they’ve only ever been an engagement metric for advertising and it didn’t matter positive or negative if people were angry downvoting they were still engaged. I’ve witnessed site after site add these systems and then the userbase turn into a toxic cesspool after. In almost 30 years I’ve only seen one roll back the change even partially. Their culture never fully recovered and its still dominated by people agitating to get attention and to one-up their perceived rivals.
Let reddit things die with reddit. Long live Lemmy.
We need the karma-equivalent of PageRank. Every vote should not be treated the same, just as Google doesn’t weight every link equally. The “one user one vote” system is the equivalent of pre-Google search engines that would rank pages by how many times they contained the search term. But it can’t be as simple as “votes from higher-karma users are worth more” because the easiest way to build insane karma is to build a bot or spam low-effort replies to every rising post. Still, the system needs to be able to extract the wisdom of the crowd from the stupidity of the crowd, and the only way to do that is to apply a weighting gradient to users and their votes.
How would you separate the wisdom of the crowd from its stupidity?
If there was an easy answer, someone would have implemented it already. Obviously, it’s a challenging problem, and I don’t claim to have the solution.
I think expanding the voting dimensions (a la Slashdot) would make it easier to create an algorithm, but it pushes complexity to the user, so that’s a tradeoff.
But, even with up/down votes, I think there are potential ways of identifying users whose votes deserve more weight. For instance, someone who up-votes both sides of an argument chain (because both sides are making good-faith responses and adding to the conversation) should be boosted.
That makes sense, thanks for the reply :)
What if we had a community standing metric that flips only between “good” and “bad.”
You get “bad standing” if the majority of your contributions in the last 6 months have a majority of downvotes than upvotes, but it resets after 6 months.
Everyone defaults to “good standing”.
This serves the purpose of a metric to filter out trolls or bad-faith actors, whilst making “karma farming” pointless.
People commonly use the downvote button as a way to indicate that they disagree. I’m not in favor of punishing unpopular opinions when they’re expressed in good faith.
But I also can’t think of a system where “troll or bad content” can be separated from “I don’t like what I read”.
The more we push popular opinions the more of them will be shared, leading to communities becoming echo chambers and even good faith arguments against the common consensus will be lumped together with the worst of bad actors.
This is exactly what I dislike about Reddit.
But I also can’t think of a system where “troll or bad content” can be separated from “I don’t like what I read”.
Me neither. People would just push whatever button means “punish commenter”. Slashdot tried for a while with multiple scores given per comment like “funny”, “informative”, etc. It didn’t take off.
This is just human behaviour though friend, I don’t think we can ever change that. People don’t want to see what they don’t want to see… it’s not necessarily a bad thing, and if you remove that power then you remove a lot of the motivation behind the platform.
I think the awards system from Reddit could work, just without it being monetized. The awards let you see how people feel about the comment, and it’s more than just good/bad, like/dislike.
Another user mentioned something like that! I like the idea :D
I think it’s less braindead than the +/- system, which I think increases our engagement & makes us treat this place more like an irl_space
I still firmly believe one of the worst things to happen to the internet, besides pop-up ads, is up and down votes. Nothing exposes a misanthrope quicker than forcing them to comment instead of passively downvoting everything they see. Which makes it easier to remove them from the party.
I think you’ve got the wrong idea about misanthropes. But who cares? You’re only interested in excluding people who disagree with you and reinforcing an echo chamber for yourself.
You’re just as much a source of toxicity in these forums as those you wish you could ban from them.
User scores are bad. Up/downvotes are bad.
The whole point of them was to create a flow of content with minimum human intervention. That’s a huge goal and The Dream if you’re making money off social media. If you’re not making money off social media then it’s not doing you any good.
Abolish karma, abolish comment and post scores.
