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

      • blivet@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Jo@readit.buzz
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Kichae@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • Kichae@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • blivet@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • YellowBendyBoy@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Or you could have a system where trolls and bad people are simply banned in stead of needing users to figure it out themselves

            • YellowBendyBoy@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • Valdair@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • jayrhacker@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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

            • VGarK@lemmy.worldOP
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              1 year ago

              I’ve googled Bayesan Interference, however I don’t understand what you meant by it. Could you elaborate please :)

              • FearTheCron@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • VGarK@lemmy.worldOP
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                  1 year ago

                  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…

                  • FearTheCron@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    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.

    • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • mack123@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Some kind of implementation of what you said would solve Reddit’s problem of mods reposting and deleting content untill it “goes viral”.

    • TheDeadGuy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago
      1. 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.

      2. The second problem is people will abuse a karma system. Bots can increase the reputation of an account to make them seem more trustworthy

      3. 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

      • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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 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.

        • Tashlan@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • GunnarRunnar@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

        • TheDeadGuy@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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

          • luna@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • VGarK@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • CynAq@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • fishos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Basically they only want autistic levels of Internet “debate” and don’t want people having low effort fun.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.