No Stupid Questions

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.

Here's a crazy idea. What if down voting a comment/post resulted in a weighted random float between 0-1 while upvoting resulted in a weighted random float between 1-2? If you virulently hate a comment or post, ignoring it is the surest way to bury in completely. Posts and comments that Garner attention become the most visible, but gaming the system for visibility could become difficult if the weighting algorithm was tuned appropriately.

Karma should have a half-life, so it's not a forever thing. Have each karma point lose half of its value every three days. Makes it more transitory.

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.

The worst part about using reddit when I first signed up was having to deal with celebrity redditors with bajillions of karma sucking all the air out of any thread they visited. Thankfully, it seems like over time people calmed down a bit with that, or maybe I just started browing non-defaults with more tight-knit communities, but you still have dumb novelty accounts that kind of ruin the experience (if you've ever been got by /u/shittymorph, you know what I'm talking about).

Live and let live - Best system ever 👌

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

I for one wish we could return to the lawlessness of old phpBB boards from the late 90s. Weren't no karma points to work any back then.

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.

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.