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
That real question is, what problem are we trying to solve? Then we can go from there.
In wondering about that myself. What is the problem?
Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.
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.
I agree with you that high karma doesn’t indicate anything besides popularity, but someone with negative karma is almost certainly either a troll or a political extremist of some sort. I do find it useful to know when I would be better off not engaging with people like that.
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:
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Use Bayesan Inference to produce a ‘shit/shinola score’ for contributors instead simple up/down vote totals
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Experiment with different recency biases for the score; you can trust that people will change over time
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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…
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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.
Repetitive low-effort posts and comments were common on Reddit
They’re common on the internet and real life in general.
That it true… if they don’t “earn” anything for low effort comments, then they will diminish
They very often get hundreds, if not thousands, of upvotes, though.
This!
/s
Number go up, makes brain happy
Number go down, makes brain sad ;(
Monkey sees negative numbers, neuron activation, monkey leaves Lemmy
Monk tap where Apollo used to be on phone. Monk end back up on lemmy
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The first problem is people tend to follow the hive mind. If it’s downvoted, they will also downvote and vice versa. They also will believe a comment with lots of upvotes and won’t fact check.
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The second problem is people will abuse a karma system. Bots can increase the reputation of an account to make them seem more trustworthy
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The third problem is that the current system let’s you see who is downvoting/upvoting. People take it personally when they are disagreed with and will retaliate since they can see those users and stalk their account
I don’t think these problems warrants a change in the current system. The transparency is a crucial feature. Seeing the number of downvotes serves as a great red flag to warn readers that a comment might not be true even if it has a larger number of upvotes.
This does take away the anonymous part of your social media voting experience, but the ability to manipulate the platform is greatly decreased. People that get riled up about disagreement will need to chill and you will need to block those individuals that can’t.
I think this will allow the development of a more mature community by taking away some of the anonymity
The third problem is that the current system let’s you see who is downvoting/upvoting. People take it personally when they are disagreed with and will retaliate since they can see those users and stalk their account
I actually really like this. I’ve been downvoted a bunch, my kbin karma sits at negative, but it’s kinda neat to see that I haven’t been downvoted by complete assholes (based on their history) – makes me appreciate that we might just have different view about a thing (or I’ve acted like an asshole to no surprise). Nonverbal communication can be a powerful thing.
Do I think it’s feasible to leave as it is if this whole thing explodes in popularity in a new magnitude while Reddit sinks? No I don’t think so.
You sound like a normal person who doesn’t take shit personally – some people really, really do take negative feedback on social media the way that you might someone keying your car, and I worry about the repercussions of downvoting the 'wrong" person who might seek reprisal. An anonymous downvote button feels like an “oh, fuck off” button, a public one feels like “fuck YOU for real” to me.
Well said there’s probably more of a barrier without the anonymity which in itself can be also unhealthy for the whole system (less user engagement). Though now thinking about it maybe that’s not a bad thing. Less bandwagoning on downvotes etc.
But truely angering some unhinged lunatic by downvoting who will then dox you, harass you and possibly kill you doesn’t sound great. But that’s a danger you’re susceptible to just by existing on internet.
Oh yes, I once had someone tell me they wanted my family to die in a fire and suffer while doing so because I didn’t think Guardians of the Galaxy was the sort of comic that would make a good movie. I was wrong, but you know, I think I was the only person who ought to suffer for that mistake.
I do tend to think that this is one of those things that the Fediverse, by not demanding everything be monolithic, is uniquely capable of dealing with because instances could provide per-community options (public up and down, private up and down, maybe an actual “fuck you” button) and people could try and figure out what works best for their unique forum.
How about, agree/disagree and informative/troll
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There are few things Karma system helps with that come to mind.
For others:
- Reputation
- Activity
For you:
- That endorphin XP boost when you level up. Makes you more likely do engage after the first hit.
- Gives you an idea how your comment has been received by others.
Presumably there are other things as well, these just quickly came to me.
That is a good way to think about it. What is the need from the reader’s perspective and from the poster’s.
One would certainly read a post with low upvotes from a author with high reputation if you are interested in the specific magazine. I wonder if the reputation should not be topic bound and not just general. That would be useful from the reader’s perspective.
Some kind of implementation of what you said would solve Reddit’s problem of mods reposting and deleting content untill it “goes viral”.
The exciting thing about this space is that much of it is undefined. It is all about the protocols and the main features at the moment. The 2nd generation tools will be born out of what we discuss now and think about now.
How do you make sure a user is not trapped in his special interest bubble and still gets to see content that has everyone excited? How will we make use of the underlying data, on both posts and users to suggest and aggregate content.
I think there will be more than one solution eventually, different flavours of aggregators running on the same underlying data.
So much possibility. And we control it. If you don’t like the way your lemmy instance or kbin aggregates, choose another site or build your own. The data is there.
Good point, take my:
handshake, pat on the back, slightly too long hug point thingy.
Yeah, the question strikes me as, “Reddit has this thing. A lot of people don’t like that thing, but how could we still have it without people not liking it?”
I think we’re good as is.
Not a problem at all. I understand that we are ego-driven, but then again, the fediverse is a new working paradigm. We are here because we want to. Genuinely curious what you guys thought!
We want to discuss topics. This is a place to do that.
Simple need, simple solution.
You don’t need an extra incentive to make people talk about things if people talking about things is the thing you want. You don’t want to incentivize people who don’t want to talk about things to be active somewhere you want people to talk about things because then those people will start doing the thing your’e incentivizing them for instead of talk about things.
I personally only want people who want to talk about things here, and don’t want people who don’t want to talk about things.
I am not sure I followed, sorry
Basically they only want autistic levels of Internet “debate” and don’t want people having low effort fun.
I’m against any kind of global user ranking.
It makes sense to rank content, but ranking users just begs abuse of the system. There’s always those that will try to farm the system resulting in lower quality content. It’s also an attack vector for bots.
I don’t miss the “karma” aspect one bit here. Rate my post quality, not me. On the other hand, tools for ranking users privately could be helpful. In other words a personal ranking for your eyes only would be fine.
I agree. I personally found the system was far too addictive, in the Cookie Clicker kind of way of “bigger number = happy”. I sometimes find myself missing it almost, only to remember that it’s worthless.
It also means I can more freely share my actual opinions, without that reflecting on some sort of global score if people generally dislike said opinion.
Yes, look up “Facebook demetricator”. It was brilliant. I’m glad I never used Facebook.
i do like the RES feature of personal counts though
if someone on res had a [+10] next to their name, i’ll know i personally respect their opinions, even if i don’t remember their name. similarly, if they have a negative number, i’ll know not to engage as they’re probably a troll
It’s a shame, but any sort of number-based system will most likely end up with the same problems as karma. Not having the numbers add up is a good start though, since upvotes and downvotes are only really useful as ‘in-the-moment’ indicators of good vs bad content.
Let’s keep it how it is, so that we don’t have another social credits system that doubles as a dopamine factory.
Another element is that total upvotes don’t need to be shown on your profile. It can be on the comments/posts alone.
I like that.
What we have right now in Lemmy strikes the current balance IMO. Individual comments are upvoted/downvoted. But no cumulative score.
which is the right thing, judge the opinion not the person
There is that aspect of karma of “if you’ve got negative karma, you’re probably intolerable” but I’m not sure how much that helps in practice vs just banning people. Karma can also filter out fresh accounts for high spam communities, ofc, that doesn’t work perfectly either…
Karma farming has always been one of the worst aspects of the other place. Repost bots will sustain them long after the humans are all gone.
Throwaways are still an issue with banning.
Some kind of participation based scoring would just bring us back to farming and alienates lurkers.
Account age is unreliable.
Hmm… I hate leaving the burden on mods but karma has too many negatives.
This wouldn’t work in the fediverse anyway, as it’d even easier to fake your user karma here (on an own instance).
I agree 90%, downvotes shouldn’t have that much weight. That said, comments which are abusive or hateful probably should have long term consequences for the user, even if they are themselves not worthy of a ban. Maybe reputation can be a “strike” for number of reported comments.
To be clear, here I’m thinking of “dogwhistle” comments which individually are plausibly fine, but in aggregate indicate this person is up to no good.
On the other hand, kbin has a cumulative score, but currently implements it badly wrong. Your cumulative ‘reputation’ is calculated as “boosts - downvotes”. So if you post a thread that gets 100 upvotes, 9 downvotes, 80 comments and 5 boosts, you are rewarded with ‘-4 reputation’. Nobody really uses boost, so it is very easy to rack up negative reputation.
Thankfully, I don’t think ‘reputation’ actually does anything, but it is still kind of annoying to be ‘punished’ for posting.
I would almost say a better system would obscure usernames completely. Only show the comment text, and allow voting accordingly.
No, we need people to have some accountability or everyone’s just gonna be intolerable.
Federation already makes that completely impossible.
I don’t agree with the lack of usernames of course. There’s no community when there is no way to associate posts with individuals.
It’s not impossible. Each user is still tied to an instance, they still have usernames, etc.
But an individual can be any user on any instance. Even one of their own creation.
basically 4chan but with extra steps 🤔
No system. The goal isn’t Reddit 2, it’s a federated link aggregator.
deleted by creator
Upvotes/downvotes are still a useful engagement metric, for instance what should appear in user feeds. Converting that engagement into long term karma encourages reposts and bad actors though so throw it out the window.
Honesty, I don’t think I really like upvotes and downvotes at all. My favorite system is Discourse where the only sort option is old -> new and you can provide reactions (heart, thumbs up, etc…) that don’t change the sort at all. This lets you follow the discussion as it happened & gauge engagement yourself.
Best would be to give it some reddit gold… er… somehow.
I love the poor crop of lemmy.world. shit just works yo.
This could work 😂 I’m giving you the wholesome award! 🦭
fax
I much prefer how Lemmy approaches this; upvote and downvote count per comment, no tally of total points.
Way less people trying to Karma farm then and repost content for fake internet points that don’t mean anything.
Web of trust. The biggest thing missing from most attempts to build social networks so far. A few sites did very weak versions, like Slashdot/s friend/foe/fan/freak rating system.
Let me subscribe, upvote, downvote, filter, etc specific content. Let me trust (or negative-trust) other users (think of it like “friend” or “block”, in simple terms)
Then, and this is the key… let me apply filters based on the sub/up/down/filter/etc actions of the people I trust, and the people they trust, etc, with diminishing returns as it gets farther away and based on how much people trust each other.
Finally, when I see problematic content, let me see the chain of trust that exposed me to it. If I trust you and you trust a Nazi, I may or may not spend time trying to convince you to un-trust that person, but if you fail or refuse then I can un-trust you to get Nazi(s) out of my feed.
It’s a novel idea, I can certainly see the nice implications of it, but it also seems incredibly excessive. Would you really going around flagging every user you see on a trust system? Or even enough users for the system to be moderately effective? And then expect many other users to do the same?
I honestly don’t think I’d use it, blocking people is enough for me.
I maintained a substantial set of tags for problematic users of all types so I knew to avoid commenting or engaging with them. In an given community it’s common for there to be a tiny percentage of prolific posters who are a real problem and tags with res is how I managed that. It absolutely can work and arguably twitter’s block and mute functions do a similar thing as thevpy reduce a user’s presentation considerably.
I found very interesting the concept of chain of trust :) What is the friend/foe/fan/freak?
Slashdot has a friend list and foe list. Fan and freak are the lists of people who name you as friend and foe respectively.
Thanks for the reading! That is very interesting concept that I’d love to see implemented here 👌🏻
I think a thing like this will even be required in the near future. Because we can no longer trust that we are talking to real humans, therefore some trust system (including physical interaction perhaps?) will be needed to not get social networks drown in AI dystopia. I have bookmarked this comment which describes the krass scenario we might find ourselves in soon: https://lemmy.ml/comment/878882
@[email protected]Re “physical interaction”… Are you old and/or geeky enough to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party ?
Unfortunately, anything you replace karma with will have the same problems that karma has. Any indicator of comment or user quality will be readily gamed by anyone with any skills whatsoever in automation.
Yes and no. Toxicity will always be around indeed… but we can definitely lessen its effect.
thing is… in the end, karma doesn’t serve as that anyway (indicator of quality). It’s so easy to karma farm by (re)posting content (sometimes even stolen) in multiple communities.
In NSFW communities, at least on Reddit, I see SO MANY posts that doesn’t fit the community they were posted in, but being upvoted anyway because… well… it’s nudity
Karma may not be an actual indicator of quality, but it is often used as such. That’s the reason why all the bots exist in the first place and they are oddly enough* also the reason it’s not a good indicator.
People look at top, People like to filter out the bottom.
Look at the alternatives. Page views? They’d be instantly botted. Engagement? Instantly botted. There’s literally not any way to indicate that the crowd likes something or that something is of interest that can’t be replicated in a hot second. Karma is the closest thing we have to a sorting filter that content creators are doing the right thing or an indicator to content consumers that something might stand out from the crowd.
I’m sitting here farming /r/interestingasfuck trying to make the /c/interestingasfuck viable and 2/3 of the highest ranked crap is garbage, The thing is, even 1/3 of it being real saves me from having to sort through thousands of page of crap to find decent stuff.
edit* missed a word
Karma does well in my opinion, however it should display the number of upvotes and downvotes, not just one number. Also adnn an option to sort by the number of downvotes.
And an option to sort by controversial would be nice.
Also add an option to sort by the number of downvotes.
More sorting options would be a nice addition. Although, being able to treat down-votes similarly to upvotes might encourage more bad behavior. I kind of want to see such a system tested.
Trolls would compete to be the worst.
Let them have their pathetic fun. We’re never going to stop trolls, might as well let them get their dumb points while they’re at it. It’s not like they aren’t typically obvious anyway.
Absolutely nothing. Reducing people to a number and ranking their value based on that is inherently wrong.
Keep it simple, the current Lemmy system works fine. Spambots and particularly disruptive people should just be banned anyways, a gamification system would not solve any issue on that front.
While I still would like to see an alternative to Karma that’s less problematic, I agree with the idea that gamification will not solve issues. If anything, it creates a “KPI/score” people want to desperately meet for the wrong reason.
But what about the dopamine hit from upvotes though…
Let’s keep the upvotes to the post/comment only, do not show the overall of a user and don’t take it into account in any algorithmic decision. Let community managers see the ‘karma’ of the user in their respective community maybe, but beyond that it’s a feature that only had negative implications on Reddit
What about hidden karma?
Like there is still karma used internally to decide what posts to promote and how to weight votes, but the numbers are kept only internally so people don’t get obsessed with that number next to their (and others’) profile?Or what if a user could see their own karma, but no one else’s? If karma isn’t publicly visible, then people may care less about it.
I think this would make people more obsessed. We would see the rise of SEO-like shenanigans where they would try to guess what makes the internal algorithm tick, complete with “karma experts” to advise you on how to optimize, etc. more of a shitshow that just having it plainly visible, I think…
Well, I was assuming we were talking about open-source software. So you wouldn’t need karma experts to “guess what makes the internal algorithm tick”. If it’s open source, the algorithm is still public. You just wouldn’t know how much karma each user has.
Tbh this is what turned me off the thunder app.
given how instances have been popping up with massive amounts of bots recently and someone even managed to get on top posts from bot upvotes recently, right now this probably wouldn’t be a good idea… Though I tried looking back for the post I’m referring to and can’t find it. maybe it got dealt with, title was like “Protect. Moderate. Purge your server” or something? the guy botted upvotes to promote to instance owners how to protect themselves from bots
No, no, no, please no hidden algorithm. that’s as bad or worse than karma, especially with the incoming bot shitstorm.
I didn’t say hidden algorithm. I was assuming we were talking about open-source software and hence public algorithm.
It’s just your karma points that would just be kept in the database without putting that number in your profile.
That changes nothing in terms of how the algorithm works. I didn’t suggest changing anything on how many details are available on how the algorithm works.
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.
Judging by the controversial comments on Reddit, I don’t know if I want to engage with 50/50 up/downvotes for any significant amount of time. I think a 60/40 ratio might be a bit more palatable while still keeping it engaging. I’m not convinced an algorithm like this is the best course of action though.
I really like this solution. Instead of making things more complicated for users or trying to control their input, observe their natural behavior and then respond to it.
Top 3 most upvoted comments always being unfunny puns was getting insufferable on Reddit. Everyone was trying to be a fucking comedian - that’s what was popular and got upvotes.
The early Reddit you could have long, interesting arguments with people and you’d both be getting upvoted because you’re both making interesting points.
It honestly feels like my brain is waking up from a digital coma since coming to Lemmy from Reddit. My own personality and opinions don’t feel pointlessly supressed and sanitised.
Making a controversial statement for attention is just as easy. What you are proposing would be a perfect environment for trolls.
Not a statement that makes people angry, because that would get ignored or downvoted. One that garners both positive and negative reactions in equal measure. That’s a lot harder to engineer; you need to look at both sides and walk the line between, pretty much getting to the crux of the issue. If the crowd can’t decide whether they agree or disagree, then to me that means it bears looking at more closely.
Ah, I see. That makes sense.
I think we should stop seeing Lemmy as just a substitute for Reddit. Lemmy can be it’s own thing, without having to do ‘reddit-like’ stuff.
Imo, I don’t think the karma system is really necessary (it doesn’t even make sense) and the upvote-downvote is good enough to filter quality posts.
That is indeed my fault. I came looking for something to end the craving and the void left by reddit. I should rethink my approach and understand that this could go beyond my ego
This is really a great approach not only to the matter at hand, but to life in general. I wish more people used it in the world.
Props to you for admitting where you could approach this in a more healthy way. Too few adults seem capable of doing such.
Thanks for those words :)
We should keep it as is. Having an account score just amplifies a big issue with sm. The content should be in focus, not the people posting. A relevant comment should be hightened because it itself is good. In the same way we shouldn’t judge something because the user has a low karma, but because the content is bad.
The idea behind something keeping a score on a profile is good, but it doesn’t work as intended in practice. People will farm in whatever way they need to get a moral highground. Not having such a scoring system will be a good way to reduce the incentive to copy/paste content from others.
You said this far better than I could. If there’s no supply, the addicts stay away.
A relevant and good comment, even and especially if it opposes the opinion of the majority. Giving downvotes to signal disagreement, when posts are sorted by karma and very low karma posts are even hidden, leads to circle jerking and immediately kills every healthy debate and controversy in the bud. If I have a dissenting opinion, I want to argue, not be muzzled.
Embrace the Lemmy system. Resistance is futile. Fake internet points are futile.
