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.
Or you could have a system where trolls and bad people are simply banned in stead of needing users to figure it out themselves
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.
That seems way better that some token system that becomes a game.
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.
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.
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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Repetitive low-effort posts and comments were common on Reddit
They’re common on the internet and real life in general.
This!
/s
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.
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.
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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.
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The second problem is people will abuse a karma system. Bots can increase the reputation of an account to make them seem more trustworthy
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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
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There are few things Karma system helps with that come to mind.
For others:
- Reputation
- Activity
For you:
- That endorphin XP boost when you level up. Makes you more likely do engage after the first hit.
- Gives you an idea how your comment has been received by others.
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.
Number go up, makes brain happy
Number go down, makes brain sad ;(
Monkey sees negative numbers, neuron activation, monkey leaves Lemmy
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
Agreed 105%
I agree 90%, downvotes shouldn’t have that much weight. That said, comments which are abusive or hateful probably should have long term consequences for the user, even if they are themselves not worthy of a ban. Maybe reputation can be a “strike” for number of reported comments.
To be clear, here I’m thinking of “dogwhistle” comments which individually are plausibly fine, but in aggregate indicate this person is up to no good.
There is that aspect of karma of “if you’ve got negative karma, you’re probably intolerable” but I’m not sure how much that helps in practice vs just banning people. Karma can also filter out fresh accounts for high spam communities, ofc, that doesn’t work perfectly either…
This wouldn’t work in the fediverse anyway, as it’d even easier to fake your user karma here (on an own instance).
Karma farming has always been one of the worst aspects of the other place. Repost bots will sustain them long after the humans are all gone.
Throwaways are still an issue with banning.
Some kind of participation based scoring would just bring us back to farming and alienates lurkers.
Account age is unreliable.
Hmm… I hate leaving the burden on mods but karma has too many negatives.
I would almost say a better system would obscure usernames completely. Only show the comment text, and allow voting accordingly.
basically 4chan but with extra steps 🤔
No, we need people to have some accountability or everyone’s just gonna be intolerable.
The problem is Lemmy already can’t allow that. Every user is Multiple Man. If you ban or block me on one instance I can just come back from another instance. What’s more, I can just keep creating more and more instances to evade blocking or banning infinitely.
My point is simply that votes on comments should reflect merit on the actual comment, not because you recognize the posters username and dont like them so you downvote them regardless of what they say.
Federation already makes that completely impossible.
I don’t agree with the lack of usernames of course. There’s no community when there is no way to associate posts with individuals.
It’s not impossible. Each user is still tied to an instance, they still have usernames, etc.
But an individual can be any user on any instance. Even one of their own creation.
No system. The goal isn’t Reddit 2, it’s a federated link aggregator.
fax
deleted by creator
Upvotes/downvotes are still a useful engagement metric, for instance what should appear in user feeds. Converting that engagement into long term karma encourages reposts and bad actors though so throw it out the window.
Honesty, I don’t think I really like upvotes and downvotes at all. My favorite system is Discourse where the only sort option is old -> new and you can provide reactions (heart, thumbs up, etc…) that don’t change the sort at all. This lets you follow the discussion as it happened & gauge engagement yourself.
Best would be to give it some reddit gold… er… somehow.
I love the poor crop of lemmy.world. shit just works yo.
I agree that it might get toxic at one point, but I’d much rather see extra preventive measures to stop repost bots, karma farming and so on rather than removing points altogether. Maybe it also helps to see karma breakdown by community: say you see someone answering a technical question on a specialised community - it would be of little to no relevance there that they might have 10000 points on r/funny or r/aww - I’d much rather see their points on that specific community.
Downvotes only so karma whores never comment, and completely random monthly account bannings so no one gets too comfortable.
The Russian roulette strategy for content aggregation.
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.
Embrace the Lemmy system. Resistance is futile. Fake internet points are futile.
It’s a shame, but any sort of number-based system will most likely end up with the same problems as karma. Not having the numbers add up is a good start though, since upvotes and downvotes are only really useful as ‘in-the-moment’ indicators of good vs bad content.
Let’s keep it how it is, so that we don’t have another social credits system that doubles as a dopamine factory.
Another element is that total upvotes don’t need to be shown on your profile. It can be on the comments/posts alone.
I like 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”.
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.
I do like that. Perhaps an exponential factor where if you downvote 10 comments you lose 1 karma, downvote 20 you lose 10 karma, etc.
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?
Oh I doubt anyone would implement that as a system, but it is interesting to speculate what it might change. Imagine all the downvote curmudgeons having to regularly post pictures of kittens to /c/aww in order to recharge their karma.
I rarely downvoted on Reddit because I’m pretty sure everyone (no matter how blasé they appear to be) gets more upset by a comment ending up at -1 than they would get pleased by it ending at +5. When I found that some instances here don’t even have the downvote button, I decided that I wasn’t going to use it here at all. If someone says something damaging to the conversation I’ll report it to the mods, if they say something factually incorrect I might correct them, but otherwise I will just move on.
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.
Sort of.
On reddit, moderators can set minimum karma thresholds to control who can post in the sub, admins can use it to control who posts anywhere sitewide.
For example, new users who make a contentious statement and get down voted for it will suddenly find themselves rate limited for posting comments. They could be in the middle of an exchange where the other user is firing back responses, but then suddenly they are restricted to making one post every few minutes in the sub.
Admin can also use that to automate things like shadow banning.
I like it as it is to be honest.
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.
Call it “updoots” instead.
This!
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
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.
You said this far better than I could. If there’s no supply, the addicts stay away.
A relevant and good comment, even and especially if it opposes the opinion of the majority. Giving downvotes to signal disagreement, when posts are sorted by karma and very low karma posts are even hidden, leads to circle jerking and immediately kills every healthy debate and controversy in the bud. If I have a dissenting opinion, I want to argue, not be muzzled.
