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

  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That real question is, what problem are we trying to solve? Then we can go from there.

      • 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. I do find it useful to know when I would be better off not engaging with people like that.

        • 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 @[email protected] 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…

        • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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!

    • 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.

    • 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”.

      • Sunforged@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Cynosure@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • puppy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What we have right now in Lemmy strikes the current balance IMO. Individual comments are upvoted/downvoted. But no cumulative score.

      • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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…

        • bionade24@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          This wouldn’t work in the fediverse anyway, as it’d even easier to fake your user karma here (on an own instance).

        • Invalid@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Machinist3359@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • DrGiltspur@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      On the other hand, kbin has a cumulative score, but currently implements it badly wrong. Your cumulative ‘reputation’ is calculated as “boosts - downvotes”. So if you post a thread that gets 100 upvotes, 9 downvotes, 80 comments and 5 boosts, you are rewarded with ‘-4 reputation’. Nobody really uses boost, so it is very easy to rack up negative reputation.

      Thankfully, I don’t think ‘reputation’ actually does anything, but it is still kind of annoying to be ‘punished’ for posting.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would almost say a better system would obscure usernames completely. Only show the comment text, and allow voting accordingly.

        • Invalid@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • FreddyNO@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Wurstkiste@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • sparr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • VGarK@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I found very interesting the concept of chain of trust :) What is the friend/foe/fan/freak?

  • Technicated@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • falcon@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

  • Sabakodgo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Karma does well in my opinion, however it should display the number of upvotes and downvotes, not just one number. Also adnn an option to sort by the number of downvotes.

    • finder@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And an option to sort by controversial would be nice.

      Also add an option to sort by the number of downvotes.

      More sorting options would be a nice addition. Although, being able to treat down-votes similarly to upvotes might encourage more bad behavior. I kind of want to see such a system tested.

      • SuperRyn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Tbf you can probably tell the actual numbers by looking at the % reddit shows in the corner, but that’s not very intuitive

        • scarabic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • C3ltic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah imo the real problem with reddit was that

      A: they started fudging the votes so they didn’t really matter and they could shadowban accounts from even being able to upovte/downvote

      B: stupid fucking awards could keep posts at the top even if they had like -2000

      c: fascists were gaming the system with bots anyway to push their content.

  • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • chuso@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • imperator3733@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Dick Justice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      No, no, no, please no hidden algorithm. that’s as bad or worse than karma, especially with the incoming bot shitstorm.

  • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Posts should just be upvoted and downvoted with no credit given to the person who posted. Same goes for comments. In my opinion, upvoting and downvoting should just help the user find the most relevant information. Content that people upvote is the most seen. Content that people downvote is the least seen. Posters and commenters stay on an equal footing with no points system.

    • HangoverTuesday@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Maybe we could still have karma, but display it as a ratio of good:bad karma or something? Active user and most of your interactions get upvoted, green dot. New user or not active for a while? Gray dot. Established user and all your content gets downvoted all the time, red dot.

      Get banned from 50+ subreddits? Your color dot gets changed to a picture of u/spez.

        • HangoverTuesday@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It provides other users with an at a glance idea of your reputation, without chasing a “high score”. Could always rank users based on up/down votes, as I said, but limit the range so that as long as you’ve been active for a few months and aren’t a douchebag, your score will be maxed out.

  • Alperto@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Karma and votes should stay but be hidden to other users. Karma is a good way to detect bots and trolls, but just admins and moderators should see it to act on them if needed. And up/down votes should be hidden too because of the hive mind phenomenon that it produces (Experienced on Reddit): often, the funny or sassy or apparently clever comment gets upvoted and sometimes, the comment with knowledge about the post gets downvoted because the first joke was funny. Many people may not have an opinion about the issue but upvote the funny guy and downvotes the real answer just following the hive. Hiding it, each person reading must decide by themselves if they upvote or downvote a comment.

    Prizes and awards could maybe stay, not sure

    • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Prizes and awards could maybe stay, not sure

      They should be used to fund the servers.

      In combination with invisible vote scores and no karma it would be a good way to highlight great content without feeding into dopamine addiction.

    • TitanLaGrange@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      often, the funny or sassy or apparently clever comment gets upvoted and sometimes, the comment with knowledge about the post gets downvoted because the first joke was funny

      This is why I like the option of having different vote categories with corresponding sort options. Sometimes I’m specifically looking for information, sometimes I’m just killing some time and don’t mind the fun.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree. I personally found the system was far too addictive, in the Cookie Clicker kind of way of “bigger number = happy”. I sometimes find myself missing it almost, only to remember that it’s worthless.

      It also means I can more freely share my actual opinions, without that reflecting on some sort of global score if people generally dislike said opinion.

    • Ɀeus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      i do like the RES feature of personal counts though

      if someone on res had a [+10] next to their name, i’ll know i personally respect their opinions, even if i don’t remember their name. similarly, if they have a negative number, i’ll know not to engage as they’re probably a troll

  • ???@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    (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

    • chairscoot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Community awards would be great. It encourages quality content and can strike a balance between new and old users.

    • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ???@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.