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

  • @solrize
    9•1 year ago

    Advogato reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric

    Added: also, Slashdot.org karma worked sort of like reddit karma except 1) you couldn’t see anyone’s karma except your own, and 2) it only had 5 or so levels, topping out at “excellent”. It took a few dozen good posts to reach excellent, and there was no point to whoring after you reached that level. Posts were ranked by upvotes/downvotes and went from -2 to +5. Anonymous posts started out at 0, posts from registered users with non-negative karma started at 1, and posts from registered users with good or higher karma started at 2. There were some more complications including voting “insightful”, “funny”, etc. and there was “meta moderation” where you could judge the accuracy of other people’s votes. Usefully, you could select “filter out all posts rated below N” where you could choose N. Looking at just the 5-rated posts gave you a quick overview of the worthwhile thoughts on that topic. There were often 1000+ comments in a thread, so no way to read them all, but reading the few dozen top ones was generally enlightening.

    Oh yes I remember, you could only vote on posts if you were a moderator (in their sense of the term) at that moment. Moderators were picked at random on a daily basis from the population of users with positive karma, or something similar. You got five “mod points” which you could spend on voting on posts, i.e. you could only rate 5 posts during your day as a mod, rather than all the posts you saw. You tended to get mod points once a month or so. It has been a long time since I spent any time there, so my memory is a bit hazy. It went down the tubes for a while, though recently it has looked better.

    • @jennwiththesea
      4•1 year ago

      I really like this karma method, but I’m curious about what led the site to going down the tubes for a bit there. Was that in any way a byproduct of the karma system, or other issues entirely?

      • @neanderthal
        6•1 year ago

        Major UI changes. It was so hates that a small group forked the code and started Soylent news.org

        To be fair, the UI changes were rather bad.

      • ohmyiv
        4•1 year ago

        There were a bunch of reasons people left. Personally, I thought the slashdot site redesign really sucked. They ruined the comment section. It was harder to follow comments and it seemed the amount of comments shown varied at random. Sometimes you would only see high rated comments, other times it showed all, even the troll comments. It was weird. And the look of the design was weird. Oversized margins that forced more scrolling. There were a few other things I didn’t like, but those were negligible.

        There was also the sourceforge drama where slashdot buried negative articles about sourceforge, its sister company. Hard to trust a site much after.

        Overall, its still usable. I still stop in once in a while to read tech news, but that’s it. Those stop ins are getting less and less, too. HN is my main go to for tech stuff.

      • @solrize
        3•1 year ago

        Why did Slashdot go down the tubes? Nothing to do with moderation, just management screwups similar to the ones Reddit has had a few times. Slashdot was sort of a 1990’s version of Reddit. It was sold a few different times and the new owners tended to try to impose unpopular changes. Those did usually get rolled back.

        Re the moderation system itself, I suspect it went through a lot of iterations. Slashdot was die-hard about free speech so had tons of trolls and spammers, but made the karma system work well enough that you could keep away from the trolling unless you chose to browse at -1. I think -2 was added sometime later when -1 was seen as not low enough. Generally you could do ok by browsing at +3. They asked for mods to browse at -1 so that you could upvote stuff that was downvoted wrongly.

        More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Peer_moderation

        It says they killed off anonymous posting in 2019, oh well. I had always thought that was a good feature despite the crap that got posted that way.