this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

As a moderator, looking at karma is one of the ways we can automate the blocking of potentially unwanted content.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had a twinge of regret the first time I realized that my Lemmy account didn't have a cumulative tally. Then I realized I didn't actually want. I am better off without the gamification of everything - especially social interaction. It doesn't really serve a purpose outside of gatekeeping, and if we put it in for the purpose of gatekeeping I think we'd all agree (at least those of us who where bot-modded back in reddit) that it's a poor substitute for human intervention in keeping bots and bad actors out.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Initially I was bummed out about not having internet points here like on reddit. However after considering the fluidity this offers... like being whoever you want to be anywhere you want... being able to migrate from one server to another... etc ithink I'd rather we keep it this way to avoid complications

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The problem isn't the points, it's the people. Everything starts to suck beyond some critical mass.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Something that is based on user activity and active users after a specific time. i.e the more users it has, the more highlighted it gets. (And before someone says about bots, etcetc that can be easily circumvented with filters and the like.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Advogato reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric

Added: also, Slashdot.org karma worked sort of like reddit karma except 1) you couldn't see anyone's karma except your own, and 2) it only had 5 or so levels, topping out at "excellent". It took a few dozen good posts to reach excellent, and there was no point to whoring after you reached that level. Posts were ranked by upvotes/downvotes and went from -2 to +5. Anonymous posts started out at 0, posts from registered users with non-negative karma started at 1, and posts from registered users with good or higher karma started at 2. There were some more complications including voting "insightful", "funny", etc. and there was "meta moderation" where you could judge the accuracy of other people's votes. Usefully, you could select "filter out all posts rated below N" where you could choose N. Looking at just the 5-rated posts gave you a quick overview of the worthwhile thoughts on that topic. There were often 1000+ comments in a thread, so no way to read them all, but reading the few dozen top ones was generally enlightening.

Oh yes I remember, you could only vote on posts if you were a moderator (in their sense of the term) at that moment. Moderators were picked at random on a daily basis from the population of users with positive karma, or something similar. You got five "mod points" which you could spend on voting on posts, i.e. you could only rate 5 posts during your day as a mod, rather than all the posts you saw. You tended to get mod points once a month or so. It has been a long time since I spent any time there, so my memory is a bit hazy. It went down the tubes for a while, though recently it has looked better.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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”.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Surely by the same logic upvoting without providing a reason for it should also be decentivised - why should negative feedback require taking the time to explain "why", whilst positive feedback would not - logically either they both require a "why" or none does.

An uneven posture when it comes to receiving feedback only makes sense if one is emotionally impacted by "somebody disagreed with me and didn't told me why" and having such a socially fragile ego is really the problem of that person, not of everybody else.

More generally and as I pointed out in a long post which I made in the other Karma thread (which I will not repeat here), the removing (or punishing) downvotes is just a strategy to incentivise more content posting, no matter how mediocre, which in turn leads to a a lower signal to noise ratio (i.e. more mindles fluff less content) which is bad for everybody - no-work negative criticism (i.e. downvotes without the need to spend time making explanatory posts) are quite an effective way of providing feedback on the shoddiness of something without the artificial barrier against criticism which is to require spending time on an explanation - I mean, if 1 or 2 downvotes get to you, then you definitelly have emotional issues you need to explore with an expert in such things as a handful of anonymous "I don't like that" can be easilly dismissed as "there are a handful of people who disagree with what I wrote (so what?!)", whilst an unexpected 10 or 20+ downvotes are often a pretty good hint to think again about what your published.

It seems to me that it's incredibly selfish and self-centred to demand that everybody else takes the time to write an explanation when you write something they disagree with: other people's time is their own and they do not exist merelly to serve your ego just as you don't exist merelly to serve theirs.

Mind you, I do think it would be fair for there to be some way for people to disable viewing of downvotes on their account, as people with such "sensitivity" to negative feedback deserve to be able to participate in social media just like everybody else and since Lemmy keeps track of both negative and positive votes getting the interface to just show the positive stuff should be reasonably easy and it would protect the ego of those who need such protection.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The worst part about using reddit when I first signed up was having to deal with celebrity redditors with bajillions of karma sucking all the air out of any thread they visited. Thankfully, it seems like over time people calmed down a bit with that, or maybe I just started browing non-defaults with more tight-knit communities, but you still have dumb novelty accounts that kind of ruin the experience (if you've ever been got by /u/shittymorph, you know what I'm talking about).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think there needs to be another system, just a lower emphasis on said system. Like others have said, just post karma.

Someone pointed out that if you make your own instance, you can probably just manipulate your reputation anyway, so it won't be in any way a judge of a person. Even then it was really only useful in extremes, aka if the person had a massively negative rep they were probably a troll, and a near-0 was a new account. Anything other than that was more a metric of time than anything else.

Sure, even post karma is an abusable system, but if you have nothing then you'll be wading through people ignoring others or using circular reasoning to make bad faith arguments. The system is good for at least dealing with extremes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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