No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

Personally I think there shouldn't be anything like it at all , that stuff should only be visible to you and nobody else . Didn't stop reddit from becoming toxic cesspit . But once its implemented it's hard to remove w/o serious consequnces . Just look at youtube dislikes .

Worst thing about karma system, r/assistance has minimum karma requirement which I think is shitty to peops who need help

Subs should be able to force sort by controversial for comments and/or posts.

Any damn fool can come up with comments that are universally approved of, or universally hated. They aren't interesting.

The phrase 'trivially true' applies - "This crime was a bad thing, and the people responsible shouldn't have done it! I am very angry at them!" may be emotionally satisfying to say or to cheer on, but it doesn't add a damn thing to the conversation, any more than "hur hur suck it libruls" does.

There isn't a term for the inverse of ragebait, but there needs to be. All the le reddit moments - the tedious meme-chains, forced in-jokes, etc.

For subs where you want interesting discussion, you want to sort both to the bottom. It's the posts that divide opinions that are worth talking about, almost by definition. If a post has a thousand votes but the total is close to zero, well hey, that's probably worth seeing and engaging wth.

Let people vote with their heart, use upvotes/downvotes however the fuck they want to instead of constantly nagging and whining about it - and then use that to detect and de-prioritise mediocrity.

It wouldn't be appropriate for all subs, but for some places, I think it'd be a huge improvement.

In my opinion the best alternative is a -1 : +1 scale. Members who contribute little are near 0, members who contribute a lot in a positive way get towards +1, if users contribute a lot in a negative way, their score goes to -1.

There are lots of different particular ways to implement this that isn't up vs. downvote count. Communities created, moderation activity, post count, engagement per post, positive reporting rate, false reporting rate, number of reports against the user, number of communites banned from, etc.

Here's a crazy idea. What if down voting a comment/post resulted in a weighted random float between 0-1 while upvoting resulted in a weighted random float between 1-2? If you virulently hate a comment or post, ignoring it is the surest way to bury in completely. Posts and comments that Garner attention become the most visible, but gaming the system for visibility could become difficult if the weighting algorithm was tuned appropriately.

yah, karma was garbage, I think we are better off without it.

How about expanding the votes into multiple kinds of karma. Make it possible to place several votes: "on topic/off topic", "funny/boring", "shit post", "solution to the question", "agree/disagree", "political", "Interesting", "Spam", "Original Content", etc.

Communities could create whatever rating is suitable for their forum.

Sort of like tags, but votable.

It would basically reward everyone for what they do (being a level 7 funny shitposter is something) but at the same time making it possible for others to filter out anything they don't care about. So instead of clicking downvote because of disagreement or upvote because it's funny, there would be an outlet for that in its own vote.

I feel that would make it easier to find quality content whether you're looking for serious debate or the hottest memes.

We'd need better comment filtering on individual communities, and it could/would be abused, but overall it would be facilitate the possibility of having different kinds of conversations on the same topic.

Sometimes I want to read funny stuff in serious topics and sometimes there is serious stuff in funny threads, and sometimes people write clever stuff that I disagree with and so on. One vote is just not enough.

I would have optional, per magazine karma. Mods can decide if they want to enable it and what rules it should follow. Personally, i would max it at some low number, like 100; above that you are an upstanding member of society and that's it.

MeowMeowBeenz would work wonders.

How about just ignoring the whole concept? I.e., voting in individual threads to rank comments, and that's it.

Personally, I enjoy how 4chan does it. Posts are anonymous and seen in chronological order. There are no upvotes/downvotes and no karma or e-peen linked to accounts. Also, everything is temporary and gets deleted off the site completely eventually.

The pros are that you have to judge posts based on its content and nothing else, and can't look through someone's post history and stalk them across the site.

The cons are that you have to shift through tonnes of shitposts just to find decent content which will eventually get deleted. You can't find the top posts of all time, because they're gone. The system also makes it a great place for trolls. 4chan has so many of them that threads entirely made up of trolls trolling trolls is a thing.

If you're looking for a site that ranks the best content then a voting system is needed. If you're looking for discussion then a voting system and permanent accounts only get in the way.

Live and let live - Best system ever 👌

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