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
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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.
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As an anarchist, by most people’s standards I’d be considered a “political extremist”, yet I haveover 236k karma on Reddit. I got it by being helpful more often than I was an asshole, and by being judicious with replies on Rising posts.
Does fact that that’s a pretty big, positive number actually matter that much if I’m in a mood, bring snarky and rude, and refusing to engage with you in good faith? Should it?
If you had quick access to a button that blocked me for, say, 72 hours, and the ability to make private notes about me would you bother even checking the number? Or would you just decide that I’m being a jerk and you don’t want to deal with me anymore right now?
Edit: See, this is why downvoting isn’t meaningful. Someone discusses something with you in good faith, tries to highlight an issue, proposes an alternative solution, and you just passive-aggressively downvote. So, I can only conclude that you’re not discussing things in good faith. So, I’ll just follow my own advice on this one.
Not related to the subject at hand, however, I’d love to hear a lil bit more about your view as an anarchist. Do you think that is one of the reasons you are part of the fediverse?
Anarchist here. And I’m here because I can no longer support Reddit. My Reddit Karma was only 14K, mostly because I try hard not to be a dick.
I can learn things from people I disagree with, if only to sharpen my own arguments.
I don’t think I’ve ever down voted someone because I disagree with them as long as they were acting in good faith.
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 @[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.
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…
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.
That sounds awesome! You seem to be quite knowledgeable about mathematics. May I ask what is your background?
Computer science. However, statistics is more of a hobby than anything. I am just intrigued by the idea of federated social media in general so I have thought a bit on how I would personally make it work. Perhaps I will make some more in depth blog posts about my ideas at some point.
It is true that mods could help in that regard, however, I believe the experience of the community should play a higher rol in defining what is the representation of the community values
Or you could have a system where trolls and bad people are simply banned in stead of needing users to figure it out themselves
That seems way better that some token system that becomes a game.
How would you find those bad actors?
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.