No Stupid Questions

I don't think having a rating system that could be farmed or abused is a good solution. There should be no incentive to generate content just for the publicity of the account. All the content ends up being reposts of low-effort things that are just more relatable, which, in all honesty, I find really lame.

Advogato reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric

Added: also, Slashdot.org karma worked sort of like reddit karma except 1) you couldn't see anyone's karma except your own, and 2) it only had 5 or so levels, topping out at "excellent". It took a few dozen good posts to reach excellent, and there was no point to whoring after you reached that level. Posts were ranked by upvotes/downvotes and went from -2 to +5. Anonymous posts started out at 0, posts from registered users with non-negative karma started at 1, and posts from registered users with good or higher karma started at 2. There were some more complications including voting "insightful", "funny", etc. and there was "meta moderation" where you could judge the accuracy of other people's votes. Usefully, you could select "filter out all posts rated below N" where you could choose N. Looking at just the 5-rated posts gave you a quick overview of the worthwhile thoughts on that topic. There were often 1000+ comments in a thread, so no way to read them all, but reading the few dozen top ones was generally enlightening.

Oh yes I remember, you could only vote on posts if you were a moderator (in their sense of the term) at that moment. Moderators were picked at random on a daily basis from the population of users with positive karma, or something similar. You got five "mod points" which you could spend on voting on posts, i.e. you could only rate 5 posts during your day as a mod, rather than all the posts you saw. You tended to get mod points once a month or so. It has been a long time since I spent any time there, so my memory is a bit hazy. It went down the tubes for a while, though recently it has looked better.

Initially I was bummed out about not having internet points here like on reddit. However after considering the fluidity this offers... like being whoever you want to be anywhere you want... being able to migrate from one server to another... etc ithink I'd rather we keep it this way to avoid complications

I would have optional, per magazine karma. Mods can decide if they want to enable it and what rules it should follow. Personally, i would max it at some low number, like 100; above that you are an upstanding member of society and that's it.

MeowMeowBeenz would work wonders.

I had a twinge of regret the first time I realized that my Lemmy account didn't have a cumulative tally. Then I realized I didn't actually want. I am better off without the gamification of everything - especially social interaction. It doesn't really serve a purpose outside of gatekeeping, and if we put it in for the purpose of gatekeeping I think we'd all agree (at least those of us who where bot-modded back in reddit) that it's a poor substitute for human intervention in keeping bots and bad actors out.

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.

Call it "updoots" instead.

Score the posts, not the individuals. Attaching imaginary points to any kind of activity instantly turns it into a competition.

Instead, any scoring should focus on actual content, which is basically what the up/down vote is.

I think it is fine now. I don't really want karma totals or a wave of different colored reactions. Upvotes or downvote. I can't even do downvote and haven't missed it.

People like big numbers. Karma systems exist because they encourage posting and engagement. Stifling growth because Karma is toxic is bad for everyone in the long run. What matters is growth.

In my opinion the best alternative is a -1 : +1 scale. Members who contribute little are near 0, members who contribute a lot in a positive way get towards +1, if users contribute a lot in a negative way, their score goes to -1.

There are lots of different particular ways to implement this that isn't up vs. downvote count. Communities created, moderation activity, post count, engagement per post, positive reporting rate, false reporting rate, number of reports against the user, number of communites banned from, etc.

How about just ignoring the whole concept? I.e., voting in individual threads to rank comments, and that's it.

I agree that it might get toxic at one point, but I'd much rather see extra preventive measures to stop repost bots, karma farming and so on rather than removing points altogether. Maybe it also helps to see karma breakdown by community: say you see someone answering a technical question on a specialised community - it would be of little to no relevance there that they might have 10000 points on r/funny or r/aww - I'd much rather see their points on that specific community.

yah, karma was garbage, I think we are better off without it.