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
Reddit’s system is bad because the people who are meant to safeguard it don’t.
Moderators of several big subs just don’t care if people karma farm (e.g. bots who use their subs to build karma and a reputation to spam in other subs). Admin have gone on record saying subs like ‘Freekarma4u’ are fine because some subs have implemented minimum karma requirements. Tools which the admins gave mods to help control activity in their sub.
of course the biggest offender is users who can’t be bothered to use the system with nuance. Did that person reply in a way that wasn’t 100% cheerleading everything i Just said? downvote brigade!
The system works fine in theory, the problem is far too many people either ignore it or misuse it.
Tagging isn’t very helpful. We’ve seen that in action on Steam reviews.
I think the only way to really make this work is to have a crowdsourced safeguard system that doesn’t rely on individuals.
Personally I think tagging is the only thing that can work, because it is a multi axis upvote downvote system that simultaneously creates metadata that isn’t tied to user identity.
The reason it DOESN’T work on Steam reviews is that bad actors are not punished for ‘joke’ tags, and a persistent reputation system per user would fix that.
When content gets a lot of views and engagement, the outlier engagement is easily identified, i.e. ‘joke’ tags, and a temporary decrement on that users’s ‘community power’ can be enacted making each of the tags they use count for less than an average user.
The opposite is true, people who frequently tag useful tags early can be identified, and given more community power, where their tags are worth temporarily slightly more than the average user.
To keep ‘community royalty’ from forming, the extra community power for good tags decreases to normal over time, meaning that only through consistent and frequent community engagement can ‘super users’ maintain their power, meaing if they start to abuse it the backlash will decrement their community power back to a normal user quickly.
With the explosion of forum manipulation and AI chatbots we NEED a better way, and the only way we are going to get there is trying new things.
Well,. here’s a new thing to try.