How about just ignoring the whole concept? I.e., voting in individual threads to rank comments, and that's it.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Personally, I enjoy how 4chan does it. Posts are anonymous and seen in chronological order. There are no upvotes/downvotes and no karma or e-peen linked to accounts. Also, everything is temporary and gets deleted off the site completely eventually.
The pros are that you have to judge posts based on its content and nothing else, and can't look through someone's post history and stalk them across the site.
The cons are that you have to shift through tonnes of shitposts just to find decent content which will eventually get deleted. You can't find the top posts of all time, because they're gone. The system also makes it a great place for trolls. 4chan has so many of them that threads entirely made up of trolls trolling trolls is a thing.
If you're looking for a site that ranks the best content then a voting system is needed. If you're looking for discussion then a voting system and permanent accounts only get in the way.
Any shortcut method of mimicking reputation can be and thus will be abused, so they're all toxic.
The only sure way to do it is the good old-fashioned way - by name recognition - actual, earned "reputation."
The way it used to work on all forums and still does on some smaller ones is that people just read posts and write their own posts and over time they come to recognize each other's names and associate them with some impression of each individual's value as a poster.
And yes - that's not very effective in gigantic forums, and it's not accessible to newcomers. You need a relatively small group of posters and new people have to pay attention in order to figure out who are the better or worse posters. That's just the way it is, and is one of the problems with gigantic forums.
I'm not a fan of this because the main thing I liked about Reddit over all the other various "social media" was that I didn't have to try to recognize names. Names didn't matter, it was all about the conversation and the subject matter. If a post or comment was good I liked it, if it was bad I disliked it, and I moved on.
RES kept track of my personal like/dislike sum for each individual, perhaps since upvotes/downvotes aren't anonymous here in the Fediverse it'd be more straightforward to do that and show that to each user.
@FaceDeer@kbin.social I actively jam this by changing my name every so often like a molting arthropod
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Personally I think there shouldn't be anything like it at all , that stuff should only be visible to you and nobody else . Didn't stop reddit from becoming toxic cesspit . But once its implemented it's hard to remove w/o serious consequnces . Just look at youtube dislikes .
Worst thing about karma system, r/assistance has minimum karma requirement which I think is shitty to peops who need help
I don't think there needs to be another system, just a lower emphasis on said system. Like others have said, just post karma.
Someone pointed out that if you make your own instance, you can probably just manipulate your reputation anyway, so it won't be in any way a judge of a person. Even then it was really only useful in extremes, aka if the person had a massively negative rep they were probably a troll, and a near-0 was a new account. Anything other than that was more a metric of time than anything else.
Sure, even post karma is an abusable system, but if you have nothing then you'll be wading through people ignoring others or using circular reasoning to make bad faith arguments. The system is good for at least dealing with extremes.
I think if we feel the need to do anything like it, chasing the number alone will be what makes people insufferable. Maybe track it invisibly on the instance where the account is hosted and display only a colour. Red for negative points, yellow up to maybe 50ish, and anything above is green. Enough to pick out the trolls while providing no reward for karma chasers. I don't think anything beyond that is useful.
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 like the idea of giving more information, however I’d say for both upvotes and downvotes. Me, as a user, I want to do things as quick as possible, so I’d say the action of upvoting/downvoting while giving more information should be embed into a quick wheel.
I like your comment, long press upvote and then select why in the categories. The same for downvoting
Downvotes only so karma whores never comment, and completely random monthly account bannings so no one gets too comfortable.
The Russian roulette strategy for content aggregation.
Every system that can be thought of (and has been suggested here) might sound great but when implemented at scale will no doubt prove to be open to abuse and require an army of mods to oversee. Otherwise every multi-million dollar social media company would have implemented it already.
Upvotes and downvotes and cumulative scores kind of do the job well enough that that’s what we keep ending up with.
That being said though, I would be interested in seeing a system where each downvote you make also counts against your own karma to discourage profligate use of the downvote to mean “I have a different opinion but can’t express it here”.
I do like that. Perhaps an exponential factor where if you downvote 10 comments you lose 1 karma, downvote 20 you lose 10 karma, etc.
Surely by the same logic upvoting without providing a reason for it should also be decentivised - why should negative feedback require taking the time to explain "why", whilst positive feedback would not - logically either they both require a "why" or none does.
An uneven posture when it comes to receiving feedback only makes sense if one is emotionally impacted by "somebody disagreed with me and didn't told me why" and having such a socially fragile ego is really the problem of that person, not of everybody else.
More generally and as I pointed out in a long post which I made in the other Karma thread (which I will not repeat here), the removing (or punishing) downvotes is just a strategy to incentivise more content posting, no matter how mediocre, which in turn leads to a a lower signal to noise ratio (i.e. more mindles fluff less content) which is bad for everybody - no-work negative criticism (i.e. downvotes without the need to spend time making explanatory posts) are quite an effective way of providing feedback on the shoddiness of something without the artificial barrier against criticism which is to require spending time on an explanation - I mean, if 1 or 2 downvotes get to you, then you definitelly have emotional issues you need to explore with an expert in such things as a handful of anonymous "I don't like that" can be easilly dismissed as "there are a handful of people who disagree with what I wrote (so what?!)", whilst an unexpected 10 or 20+ downvotes are often a pretty good hint to think again about what your published.
It seems to me that it's incredibly selfish and self-centred to demand that everybody else takes the time to write an explanation when you write something they disagree with: other people's time is their own and they do not exist merelly to serve your ego just as you don't exist merelly to serve theirs.
Mind you, I do think it would be fair for there to be some way for people to disable viewing of downvotes on their account, as people with such "sensitivity" to negative feedback deserve to be able to participate in social media just like everybody else and since Lemmy keeps track of both negative and positive votes getting the interface to just show the positive stuff should be reasonably easy and it would protect the ego of those who need such protection.
Something that is based on user activity and active users after a specific time. i.e the more users it has, the more highlighted it gets. (And before someone says about bots, etcetc that can be easily circumvented with filters and the like.)