No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

Downvotes only so karma whores never comment, and completely random monthly account bannings so no one gets too comfortable.

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.

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.

It's very easily abused. Does Karma affect article and comment visibility on Reddit? I don't know the details, but if so I'd suggest that it not do so here. Maybe just have it be a number calculated from boosts, upvotes and downvotes that you can see on the profile if you are a mod trying to determine if someone tends to troll, but not something that has any affect on whether or not your stuff is displayed.

This may be a dumb Idee so please go ahead and tell me if it is. It seem ppl use it to know who to block in advance. What if you get a red name or some kind of info on the profile if the account has been blocked by other users and it is above 10 or 20 blocks? Would that help? That would suck for that account because it will forever be the ass hole account. But at least no one would really want to farm that except the trolls who want ppl to know they are trolls.

I like how it is now tho. It is good when the mods are responsible first and foremost instead of a system.

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?

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.

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

From this and other posts on this as well as comments I read and discussions that made me think about it, here's my suggestion.

• Upvotes and downvotes but lemmy allows people to only see upvotes in their client if they wish to (be it because they don't like the "negativity" of downvotes or because they're not very good at emotionally dealing with seeing their own comments downvoted)
• Some kind of summary of upvotes/downvotes a user got on his or her posts, per forum and only if enabled in that forum. The objective being to as much as possive avoid the gamification side of karma and its side effects (i.e. people taking it in as a "score" which leads to things like karma farming) whilst preserving the positive side of it as a measure of domain expertise or at least willingness to positivelly participate in domain specific forums.

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.