If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn't matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.

To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.

+3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
+2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
+1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
+0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
-1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”

[Posted this comment on GitHub.]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

Who determines the quality of one's posts though?

The users? Users are reactionary and often vote based on how a post influenced their feelings. It probably works on Stack Exchange because the scope of the forum is solving technical problems.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Any implementation is of course free to use a reputation system, but it seems hard to implement. You don't necessarily know all the votes a remote user has received. Say you get a vote to a post from a user who you've never heard about before. But actually this user is a well-respected member of their own instance and has been on that instance for years. Meanwhile, your instance believes this is an inactive spammer or new account or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Couldn't you have the main instance take care of it? I don't exactly know how activitypub handles votes but if they're reported back to the users home instance it could be calculated there.

For example if I had a reputation of 12 and I posted on a different instance and got enough votes to get 1 extra reputation those votes would be reported back to my instance which would update my rep accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

But how would I, an external instance, know your true reputation? Would I need to ask your home instance and just trust that? So when I ask "what level of trust should I put in this user", a malicious instance could just say "a million reputation points" and I just need to trust that? I don't see how this is going to work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah that's fair, but without some form of centralization I don't see how you establish trust. Unless you have every instance scan every users history but that would be pretty inefficient

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

This is actually something I have not thought of, the only issue is that people are going to use it as a I like this instead of this is high quality, which I think is the biggest hindrance of that. This is also going to be nearly impossible to moderate on a federation level because an instance could be spun up that would lie about the reputation of an account and everyone would just go to that instance due to the fact that it doesn't have that restriction

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

-1 for rep/karma system. Most people agree that it's good we don't have karma here.