No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
That real question is, what problem are we trying to solve? Then we can go from there.
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.
The thing is, high karma on Reddit doesn't mean someone has a history of thoughtful engagement. Just as often, if not more, it means someone whose well timed with zingers on popular posts.
And incentivising that kind of take-down behaviour actually creates toxic communities.
I agree with you that high karma doesn’t indicate anything besides popularity, but someone with negative karma is almost certainly either a troll or a political extremist of some sort. I do find it useful to know when I would be better off not engaging with people like that.
As an anarchist, by most people's standards I'd be considered a "political extremist", yet I haveover 236k karma on Reddit. I got it by being helpful more often than I was an asshole, and by being judicious with replies on Rising posts.
Does fact that that's a pretty big, positive number actually matter that much if I'm in a mood, bring snarky and rude, and refusing to engage with you in good faith? Should it?
If you had quick access to a button that blocked me for, say, 72 hours, and the ability to make private notes about me would you bother even checking the number? Or would you just decide that I'm being a jerk and you don't want to deal with me anymore right now?
You can check their post history? Karma doesn't tell you anything, really. Mine went up tenfold one day just because I replied to what ended up as the top post in a top thread in a much bigger sub than those I normally post in. Some people spend all their time in big subs making short, smart remarks that get a lot of karma, others spend their time in enemy territory battling people they disagree with. Some toxic people have a lot of karma because they hang out in toxic subs.
The problem to be solved is how to order threads. Old skool bulletin boards just bump the most recently replied one to the top. Which works well on an old skool bulletin board as long as it isn't too large, but very badly on a big site where a few big active threads can drown out all the others.
I don't know what the solution is. But the numbers don't mean anything without checking the context. Karma is useful for ordering threads/comments, and giving users a bit of dopamine when they get some attention. But there (probably) are better ways to do it.
I don't even know that karma/upvotes are good for ordering threads or comments. It just encourages gamification, group think, and snark.
I'd say get rid of down votes, replace upvotes with emoji reacts, and sort based on reacts + replies, but that's probably just encouraging gamification, group think, and snark, too.
Reddit, like other centralized social networks that are trying to monetize us, prioritizes time on site and generic "engagement". Those are what generate the most money for the company.
They're not what's best for us as users.
Maybe what we need to do is allow users to quickly and easily hide comment chains - not just collapse them, but dismiss them entirely - and allow for user-scriptable and shareable sorting algorithms. We drop down votes entirely, because they're just used passive-aggressively anyway, make blocking users as easy as possible, with temp blocks and notification silences at the ready, and then forget about user reputation points entirely, because they're as meaningless as Dragonball Z power levels.
Good stuff, thanks.
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:
Use Bayesan Inference to produce a 'shit/shinola score' for contributors instead simple up/down vote totals
Experiment with different recency biases for the score; you can trust that people will change over time
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 @[email protected] 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…
Spam detectors are pretty opaque by their nature. In contrast, karma is pretty easy to understand: "x number of people upvoted comments or posts from this user". This lets people understand a score even if they don't agree. If a karma replacement behaved like a spam detector, it would probably just annoy people.
Sporting brackets may be a better analogy. They are developed with statistics in mind but are understandable to the average sports fan. I think a karma replacement should have similar properties.
That sounds awesome! You seem to be quite knowledgeable about mathematics. May I ask what is your background?
Computer science. However, statistics is more of a hobby than anything. I am just intrigued by the idea of federated social media in general so I have thought a bit on how I would personally make it work. Perhaps I will make some more in depth blog posts about my ideas at some point.
Or you could have a system where trolls and bad people are simply banned in stead of needing users to figure it out themselves
That seems way better that some token system that becomes a game.
How would you find those bad actors?
They get reporterd and the admins ban them. Simple as that. And the same holds as for the rest of the fediverse, servers that don’t moderate well will get defederated. On Reddit bad actors can just run around unhindered, here not so much.
Repetitive low-effort posts and comments were common on Reddit
They’re common on the internet and real life in general.
That it true… if they don’t “earn” anything for low effort comments, then they will diminish
They very often get hundreds, if not thousands, of upvotes, though.
This!
/s
Number go up, makes brain happy
Number go down, makes brain sad ;(
Monkey sees negative numbers, neuron activation, monkey leaves Lemmy
Monk tap where Apollo used to be on phone. Monk end back up on lemmy
There are few things Karma system helps with that come to mind.
For others:
For you:
Presumably there are other things as well, these just quickly came to me.
That is a good way to think about it. What is the need from the reader's perspective and from the poster's.
One would certainly read a post with low upvotes from a author with high reputation if you are interested in the specific magazine. I wonder if the reputation should not be topic bound and not just general. That would be useful from the reader's perspective.
Some kind of implementation of what you said would solve Reddit's problem of mods reposting and deleting content untill it "goes viral".
The exciting thing about this space is that much of it is undefined. It is all about the protocols and the main features at the moment. The 2nd generation tools will be born out of what we discuss now and think about now.
How do you make sure a user is not trapped in his special interest bubble and still gets to see content that has everyone excited? How will we make use of the underlying data, on both posts and users to suggest and aggregate content.
I think there will be more than one solution eventually, different flavours of aggregators running on the same underlying data.
So much possibility. And we control it. If you don't like the way your lemmy instance or kbin aggregates, choose another site or build your own. The data is there.
The first problem is people tend to follow the hive mind. If it's downvoted, they will also downvote and vice versa. They also will believe a comment with lots of upvotes and won't fact check.
The second problem is people will abuse a karma system. Bots can increase the reputation of an account to make them seem more trustworthy
The third problem is that the current system let's you see who is downvoting/upvoting. People take it personally when they are disagreed with and will retaliate since they can see those users and stalk their account
I don't think these problems warrants a change in the current system. The transparency is a crucial feature. Seeing the number of downvotes serves as a great red flag to warn readers that a comment might not be true even if it has a larger number of upvotes.
This does take away the anonymous part of your social media voting experience, but the ability to manipulate the platform is greatly decreased. People that get riled up about disagreement will need to chill and you will need to block those individuals that can't.
I think this will allow the development of a more mature community by taking away some of the anonymity
I actually really like this. I've been downvoted a bunch, my kbin karma sits at negative, but it's kinda neat to see that I haven't been downvoted by complete assholes (based on their history) -- makes me appreciate that we might just have different view about a thing (or I've acted like an asshole to no surprise). Nonverbal communication can be a powerful thing.
Do I think it's feasible to leave as it is if this whole thing explodes in popularity in a new magnitude while Reddit sinks? No I don't think so.
It's a definitely an area to watch but I'm a huge believer that transparency makes a community better regardless of size. If you being brigaded or abused it's visible to everyone and you can block those accounts if you wanted
The ultimate hope is that social media evolves for the better
On the one hand yes, but also, this makes it much less incentivizing to downvote instances of abuse, discrimination, far right extremism. A lot of those people are not okay mentally and hiighly committed to harassing anyone who disagrees with them, I constantly hear stories of a single disagreement leading to years of harassment on hundreds of alts.
You sound like a normal person who doesn't take shit personally -- some people really, really do take negative feedback on social media the way that you might someone keying your car, and I worry about the repercussions of downvoting the 'wrong" person who might seek reprisal. An anonymous downvote button feels like an "oh, fuck off" button, a public one feels like "fuck YOU for real" to me.
Well said there's probably more of a barrier without the anonymity which in itself can be also unhealthy for the whole system (less user engagement). Though now thinking about it maybe that's not a bad thing. Less bandwagoning on downvotes etc.
But truely angering some unhinged lunatic by downvoting who will then dox you, harass you and possibly kill you doesn't sound great. But that's a danger you're susceptible to just by existing on internet.
Oh yes, I once had someone tell me they wanted my family to die in a fire and suffer while doing so because I didn't think Guardians of the Galaxy was the sort of comic that would make a good movie. I was wrong, but you know, I think I was the only person who ought to suffer for that mistake.
I do tend to think that this is one of those things that the Fediverse, by not demanding everything be monolithic, is uniquely capable of dealing with because instances could provide per-community options (public up and down, private up and down, maybe an actual "fuck you" button) and people could try and figure out what works best for their unique forum.
How about, agree/disagree and informative/troll
Not a problem at all. I understand that we are ego-driven, but then again, the fediverse is a new working paradigm. We are here because we want to. Genuinely curious what you guys thought!
We want to discuss topics. This is a place to do that.
Simple need, simple solution.
You don't need an extra incentive to make people talk about things if people talking about things is the thing you want. You don't want to incentivize people who don't want to talk about things to be active somewhere you want people to talk about things because then those people will start doing the thing your'e incentivizing them for instead of talk about things.
I personally only want people who want to talk about things here, and don't want people who don't want to talk about things.
I am not sure I followed, sorry
Basically they only want autistic levels of Internet “debate” and don’t want people having low effort fun.
Exactly this. You want to incentivize discussion, not the dopamine rush casino/arcade that just leads to low effort, low quality posts. If people want to be here for discussion, then they will either lurk and consume, or participate earnestly. Don't put systems in place that reward the opposite.
Good point, take my:
handshake, pat on the back, slightly too long hug point thingy.
Yeah, the question strikes me as, "Reddit has this thing. A lot of people don't like that thing, but how could we still have it without people not liking it?"
I think we're good as is.