No Stupid Questions

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

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

No system. The goal isn't Reddit 2, it's a federated link aggregator.

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.

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.

What about the same system, but it shows both upvotes and downvotes?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Embrace the Lemmy system. Resistance is futile. Fake internet points are futile.

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.

(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

Why not keep the scores hidden and just use them to order stuff?

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.

I don't think you can have anything in the same spirit that isn't toxic and doesn't encourage brigading by minority groups who want to cancel opinions they don't like. The whole concept is simply glorified ad hominem.

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

Personally i like to call em WIP. Worthless internet points. Just to be clear i cherish my WIP. I would never disrespect my WIP. That's just my name for it.

I like the system as it is here at the moment. Up-/Downvotes per Post/Comment to show the popularity (and express (dis-)approval). But nothing to collect per account, so noone gets encouraged to post just for the karma.

I don't think having a rating system that could be farmed or abused is a good solution. There should be no incentive to generate content just for the publicity of the account. All the content ends up being reposts of low-effort things that are just more relatable, which, in all honesty, I find really lame.

I like it as it is to be honest.

I loved forums, and we didn't have anything, except for 'total posts' and 'total replies' for users. I like that.

I do like upvoting, but I think karma should be hidden. Maybe if you go to user profile and click a button to see the value. It should not show if you hover over the user in a discussion, like Reddit. This is too much incentive for Karma farming.

I don't like downvotes, and that's the reason I'm on lemmy.one - no downvotes here at all

Call it "updoots" instead.

Not really sure what you think is wrong with karma? most of reddit's problem IMO come down to bad moderation.

But for comment scoring, there are really just 3 methods I've seen:

• Generic Up/Downvote - Reddit
• Categorized Up/Downvote - Slashdot - This worked on a technical forum to keep technical knowledge near the top, while still allowing stupid/funny comments further down the page, plus it made ignoring stupid/funny threads easy
• Personalized Up/Downvote - Facebook/Twitter/etc - basically build a profile of users you agree/interact with, and then weight their interactions accordingly to predict what content you'll like/hate.
  • I believe Ticktok take this to the next level, because 90% of users don't up/downvote, ticktok logs the passive act of continuing to watch content as a partial upvote making their algorithms train on the average users likes/dislikes faster.

You could probably combine Personalized & Categorized, but I've AFAIK not seen it done.

I think the problems with moderation are harder to solve, because you have both bad-faith moderators & good-faith but easily played moderators as problems, and you also want different dynamics as forums grow.

I think lemmy could really experiment with good moderation & meta-moderation and if the developers are interested anyway, be a far better forum as a result.

• Peer review of moderator decisions is something Slashdot did that went quite well. Once you'd been an active user with good "karma" for a while you would occasionally be asked to review other users votes, I think a similar thing could be done for moderation decisions
• Elected mods. For subs above a certain size, having moderation essentially boil down to whatever the guy who created the sub decides, is bad. I don't know exactly how it would work to prevent abuse, but as subs grow, at some point it would be good if the community chose the mods.
  • even short of full fledged democracy community approval of mod appointments would certainly reduce the amount of mod drama where it 1 bad head mod, will purge the other mods and replace them all with sock puppets.
• Users-led replacement of bad mods, similar to electing mods, it would be good for users to "recall" a bad mod.
• Transparency over mod actions, I understand that with the number of Nazis & other assorted trolls online reddit chose to let mods, moderate anonymously, but it really means you have no idea who is doing a good/bad job in many subreddits, some level of transparency for all but the worst content is key.
• Moving subs, as lemmy instances have some control over the content of the subs that reside on them, it would make sense for there to be some method for the users + mods of a sub to decide to move it to another instances. This not only prevents admin abuse, but also encourages competition between instances for technical administration & content administration.
• Splitting communities , sometimes subs grow "too big" and have different subcommunities that end up fighting for control of a sub, it would be good if there were a way of these communities splitting into 2 rather than fighting over the original name. not sure how it would work, but thinking about how r/trees & r/cannabis split or something similar. Maybe /r/canabis could become an combo of /r/canabisnews & /r/canabismemes, where users can just ubsub from the 1/2 of the content they don't want.
• Letting users weight subs/filter subs how much of subs they see, sometimes I've unsubbed from a high-content sub, just because while i liked the content it was overpowering the rest of my feed, it would be nice to have users configure how much of a sub they see (especially if combined with Categorized Up/Downvote), rather than complaining about "bad moderation" I can just personally choose to see less of what I don't want.

Anyway thank you for reading/not-reading my ted talk, but I suspect this will come up again so now I can copy/pasta it.