What other less-toxic system could work instead of karma?
What other less-toxic system could work instead of karma?
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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I think a reputation system is important, though reddit's current karma implementation is bad, there needs to be a method of identifying bad actors and forum shifters.
One refinement over karma could be that the score is kept only by community and should reflect that users contribution to the community.
Simple upvotes and downvotes also don't allow for nuance, replace them with a Buzzfeed like tag system (yes I know we all hate the site for its content but its tag system if used properly could be pretty powerful.
So instead of 'up' and 'down', you have a clickable emoji-menu like list of tags like 'interesting', 'boring', 'funny', 'WTF!?', 'Quality', 'Trash', 'Educational', 'CAT', etc...
So the reputation score for the community isn't just a flat number, rather it will tell you the kind of content a person posts over time, and doesn't carry just flat positive or negative connotation.
I mean the king of Catposting may have massive reputation in meme subs with high ranks in tags for 'Funny', 'Cute', and 'CAT' though that might not be the case if they participate in say a chemistry QnA community.
As these scores are created over time based on each users contributions (post AND comment reputation is the same thing) to the sub as scored by other people's tag selections for that users posts. The more it aligns with the community, the greater their contribution score.
Does this mean that toxic communities can form that exclude people based on reputation tags that the toxic community detests?
Unfortunately yes, that is one of the flaws of the system.
THOUGH
The fact it is contained by community means that a high rep person in an anti-trans community will not have any carryover reputation when joining a community they wish to brigade or degrade the quality of content, and their tag history will make it easy to determine their genuine engagement.
So instead of 'up' and 'down', you have a clickable emoji-menu like list of tags like 'interesting', 'boring', 'funny', 'WTF!?', 'Quality', 'Trash', 'Educational', 'CAT', etc...
I'm not sure about this. How do you decide which qualities users can rate? How do you ensure those qualities work across instances with different languages / cultures? You're also taking something which is extremely low effort and making it take significantly more time and effort. I think the simplicity, universality, and low effort of upvote / downvote are all strengths.
There will be a set of tags that the community settles on, things like 'funny' and 'informative', but also like with any hashtag I think users should be able to create their own and then let other users choose to use or ignore it. This means each community can create their own tag noetic library where the tags only apply to that community's meaning.
For example the tag 'sick' may mean 'awesome' in the extreme sports subs but mean 'actually ill' in the medical subs, and people can use both freely knowing that it will be the community connotation that is used.
This also means it is language agnostic and people can use the language they use the site in to create new tag clouds for communities.
And with the coming AI chatbot age and forum manipulation, we NEED something better than simple, we need something adaptive, language agnostic, and community focused.
This would take some work, however, it is possible. Almost all the languages share some common concepts, such as love, hate, disgust, “what the eff”, cute… the symbology of them may be different, in japan, this🫰🏻means ❤️, for instance. It would be a matter of i18n the tags for a better localisation
I got some inspiration from the Dark Souls messages system, and how it can be cross language
Never reached that far on any Dark Souls to even need to send messages/emotes… 😂
This was basically my idea, though as I've been reading through other people's posts and thinking about it a bit harder, I'd rather have something like an accolade system, which is basically what you described except the accolades or emojis available are decided either by op or by topic.
Personally I don't think negative options are terribly important, however I can see how in some cases they would be useful to have.
I would hope that there would be a quick limit of 2 or 3 accolades per topic, and having the topic sorted by whichever accolade people would be interested in. Such as a science post being sorted by either "informative" or "accurate" replies.
A more general topic like Pic sharing could have a few different accolades to give the post a quick tag to be sorted by. Things like "cute", "interesting", or "gross".
Users would gain a small color bar of accolades as they use the platform with an overall number of all of them and a brief breakdown of which accolades they have the most of.
To keep it tidy, we'd just need to create a short but useful list of accolades that would fit pretty much any type of content we can imagine, and I'd be interested in seeing a few "super accolades" for certain account types, such as bots.
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.
This is a new way of taking the whole + and -. I like it! Even if bad actors are “bottled” into specific communities is not something bad. You could identify those communities too. That would give the users more knowledge if they would want to join or not 👌🏻