No Stupid Questions

We need the karma-equivalent of PageRank. Every vote should not be treated the same, just as Google doesn't weight every link equally. The "one user one vote" system is the equivalent of pre-Google search engines that would rank pages by how many times they contained the search term. But it can't be as simple as "votes from higher-karma users are worth more" because the easiest way to build insane karma is to build a bot or spam low-effort replies to every rising post. Still, the system needs to be able to extract the wisdom of the crowd from the stupidity of the crowd, and the only way to do that is to apply a weighting gradient to users and their votes.

The problem isn't the points, it's the people. Everything starts to suck beyond some critical mass.

What if we had a community standing metric that flips only between "good" and "bad."

You get "bad standing" if the majority of your contributions in the last 6 months have a majority of downvotes than upvotes, but it resets after 6 months.

Everyone defaults to "good standing".

This serves the purpose of a metric to filter out trolls or bad-faith actors, whilst making "karma farming" pointless.

I think voting has the potential to be very useful but what we want to move away from is the reactionary "I disagree with you / dislike your post, so downvote"

One experiment I would like to see is requiring a reason when downvoting. Factually incorrect, violates this magazine's civility code, trolling, etc. Some reasons might have overlap with the report feature, so a downvote for e.g. illegal content might automatically notify the moderators as well. This might be contingent on a feature that can impose restrictions for abuse of the report feature.

Although it is already relatively easy for anyone to notice when an account is blanket downvoting a thread. In theory, it's already a bit easier for users to sniff out bad actors because they'll either have a clear pattern of misbehavior or a conspicuous lack of account age or participation

I think the awards system from Reddit could work, just without it being monetized. The awards let you see how people feel about the comment, and it’s more than just good/bad, like/dislike.

It's very easily abused. Does Karma affect article and comment visibility on Reddit? I don't know the details, but if so I'd suggest that it not do so here. Maybe just have it be a number calculated from boosts, upvotes and downvotes that you can see on the profile if you are a mod trying to determine if someone tends to troll, but not something that has any affect on whether or not your stuff is displayed.

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?

Honestly it's pretty good to have the transparency of who is up voting, and down voting. Makes it easier to figure out who's farming or not. It's pretty good against the trolls too imo.

Non-algorithmic ordering, auto-collapse replies after a certain user-preferred setting.

From this and other posts on this as well as comments I read and discussions that made me think about it, here's my suggestion.

• Upvotes and downvotes but lemmy allows people to only see upvotes in their client if they wish to (be it because they don't like the "negativity" of downvotes or because they're not very good at emotionally dealing with seeing their own comments downvoted)
• Some kind of summary of upvotes/downvotes a user got on his or her posts, per forum and only if enabled in that forum. The objective being to as much as possive avoid the gamification side of karma and its side effects (i.e. people taking it in as a "score" which leads to things like karma farming) whilst preserving the positive side of it as a measure of domain expertise or at least willingness to positivelly participate in domain specific forums.