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.
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.
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.
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.
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 @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…
-
Repetitive low-effort posts and comments were common on Reddit
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.
Number go up, makes brain happy
Number go down, makes brain sad ;(
Monkey sees negative numbers, neuron activation, monkey leaves Lemmy
Good point, take my:
handshake, pat on the back, slightly too long hug point thingy.
-
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
-
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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 much prefer how Lemmy approaches this; upvote and downvote count per comment, no tally of total points.
Way less people trying to Karma farm then and repost content for fake internet points that don’t mean anything.
Unfortunately, anything you replace karma with will have the same problems that karma has. Any indicator of comment or user quality will be readily gamed by anyone with any skills whatsoever in automation.
Yes and no. Toxicity will always be around indeed… but we can definitely lessen its effect.
thing is… in the end, karma doesn’t serve as that anyway (indicator of quality). It’s so easy to karma farm by (re)posting content (sometimes even stolen) in multiple communities.
In NSFW communities, at least on Reddit, I see SO MANY posts that doesn’t fit the community they were posted in, but being upvoted anyway because… well… it’s nudity
Karma may not be an actual indicator of quality, but it is often used as such. That’s the reason why all the bots exist in the first place and they are oddly enough* also the reason it’s not a good indicator.
People look at top, People like to filter out the bottom.
Look at the alternatives. Page views? They’d be instantly botted. Engagement? Instantly botted. There’s literally not any way to indicate that the crowd likes something or that something is of interest that can’t be replicated in a hot second. Karma is the closest thing we have to a sorting filter that content creators are doing the right thing or an indicator to content consumers that something might stand out from the crowd.
I’m sitting here farming /r/interestingasfuck trying to make the /c/interestingasfuck viable and 2/3 of the highest ranked crap is garbage, The thing is, even 1/3 of it being real saves me from having to sort through thousands of page of crap to find decent stuff.
edit* missed a word
What about the same system, but it shows both upvotes and downvotes?
I’d prefer that. 2600 up and 2500 down is really different than 105 up and 5 down
Tbf you can probably tell the actual numbers by looking at the % reddit shows in the corner, but that’s not very intuitive
You can do that for Reddit posts but can you also see it for comments? It wasn’t shown in my client app but perhaps it’s visible elsewhere.
I’m against any kind of global user ranking.
It makes sense to rank content, but ranking users just begs abuse of the system. There’s always those that will try to farm the system resulting in lower quality content. It’s also an attack vector for bots.
I don’t miss the “karma” aspect one bit here. Rate my post quality, not me. On the other hand, tools for ranking users privately could be helpful. In other words a personal ranking for your eyes only would be fine.
(1) No Karma system at all
(2) Karma spread over several numbers rather that one; think of Github’s user page for example, stats for everything in general on one’s profile to reflect general activity
(3) Community award badges
Community awards would be great. It encourages quality content and can strike a balance between new and old users.
I do like the community badges. And honestly, I would be ok if “karma” was how many “gold” awards a user received, at least there would be some monetary rate limit there to prevent bots from gaming the karma system. Also Lemmy communities would benefit and it would help pay for server costs.
I agree that it would have to have lots of rules and limits to discourage bots/farming.
Having it help fund the servers is an excellent idea, fully community-driven.
What about hidden karma?
Like there is still karma used internally to decide what posts to promote and how to weight votes, but the numbers are kept only internally so people don’t get obsessed with that number next to their (and others’) profile?Or what if a user could see their own karma, but no one else’s? If karma isn’t publicly visible, then people may care less about it.
my take: up only, no down, per-post only, no account. if someone is repeatedly a problem mods can show them the door.
karma systems have been around forever allegedly to decrease mod/admin workload managing users by having them “self moderate” and that has NEVER been the actual effect - they’ve only ever been an engagement metric for advertising and it didn’t matter positive or negative if people were angry downvoting they were still engaged. I’ve witnessed site after site add these systems and then the userbase turn into a toxic cesspool after. In almost 30 years I’ve only seen one roll back the change even partially. Their culture never fully recovered and its still dominated by people agitating to get attention and to one-up their perceived rivals.
Let reddit things die with reddit. Long live Lemmy.
I’d also add a (funny/informative/opinion) vote button aswell. These spaces can become noise drowners where information can be drowned by repeated jokes that get upvoted to the top. Too many times I’ve seen conversations like “Does this mean I can do A or B? - Yes.”
Itgets really exhausting. Having an easy filter to skip the noise would be great.Beehaw runs without downvotes, and so far it’s encouraging. I had a civil discussion with someone in what on Reddit would have been a downvote-fuelled flame war.
I have felt the same way on several lemmy instances now - that whole culture just isn’t here so far. People speak what they are thinking and aren’t randomly crapped on for it. if someone disagrees, they just say so and why. Its wonderful.
Absolutely nothing. Reducing people to a number and ranking their value based on that is inherently wrong.
Keep it simple, the current Lemmy system works fine. Spambots and particularly disruptive people should just be banned anyways, a gamification system would not solve any issue on that front.
While I still would like to see an alternative to Karma that’s less problematic, I agree with the idea that gamification will not solve issues. If anything, it creates a “KPI/score” people want to desperately meet for the wrong reason.
But what about the dopamine hit from upvotes though…
Let’s keep the upvotes to the post/comment only, do not show the overall of a user and don’t take it into account in any algorithmic decision. Let community managers see the ‘karma’ of the user in their respective community maybe, but beyond that it’s a feature that only had negative implications on Reddit
Score the posts, not the individuals. Attaching imaginary points to any kind of activity instantly turns it into a competition.
Instead, any scoring should focus on actual content, which is basically what the up/down vote is.
I like this, and I also remember forums where you knew that that type was good but weird, that one was nice but not very good etc etc. You had to build your “real” reputation because it was an enouy small space.
I hope Reddit will explode and create gazillions of normal sized subs…
No system. The goal isn’t Reddit 2, it’s a federated link aggregator.
deleted by creator
Best would be to give it some reddit gold… er… somehow.
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.
Web of trust. The biggest thing missing from most attempts to build social networks so far. A few sites did very weak versions, like Slashdot/s friend/foe/fan/freak rating system.
Let me subscribe, upvote, downvote, filter, etc specific content. Let me trust (or negative-trust) other users (think of it like “friend” or “block”, in simple terms)
Then, and this is the key… let me apply filters based on the sub/up/down/filter/etc actions of the people I trust, and the people they trust, etc, with diminishing returns as it gets farther away and based on how much people trust each other.
Finally, when I see problematic content, let me see the chain of trust that exposed me to it. If I trust you and you trust a Nazi, I may or may not spend time trying to convince you to un-trust that person, but if you fail or refuse then I can un-trust you to get Nazi(s) out of my feed.
It’s a novel idea, I can certainly see the nice implications of it, but it also seems incredibly excessive. Would you really going around flagging every user you see on a trust system? Or even enough for the system to be moderately effective? And then expect many other users to do the same?
I honestly don’t think I’d use it, blocking people is enough for me.
I think we should stop seeing Lemmy as just a substitute for Reddit. Lemmy can be it’s own thing, without having to do ‘reddit-like’ stuff.
Imo, I don’t think the karma system is really necessary (it doesn’t even make sense) and the upvote-downvote is good enough to filter quality posts.
That is indeed my fault. I came looking for something to end the craving and the void left by reddit. I should rethink my approach and understand that this could go beyond my ego
Props to you for admitting where you could approach this in a more healthy way. Too few adults seem capable of doing such.
Thanks for those words :)
This is really a great approach not only to the matter at hand, but to life in general. I wish more people used it in the world.
