No Stupid Questions

I think a reputation system is important, though reddit's current karma implementation is bad, there needs to be a method of identifying bad actors and forum shifters.

One refinement over karma could be that the score is kept only by community and should reflect that users contribution to the community.

Simple upvotes and downvotes also don't allow for nuance, replace them with a Buzzfeed like tag system (yes I know we all hate the site for its content but its tag system if used properly could be pretty powerful.

So instead of 'up' and 'down', you have a clickable emoji-menu like list of tags like 'interesting', 'boring', 'funny', 'WTF!?', 'Quality', 'Trash', 'Educational', 'CAT', etc...

So the reputation score for the community isn't just a flat number, rather it will tell you the kind of content a person posts over time, and doesn't carry just flat positive or negative connotation.

I mean the king of Catposting may have massive reputation in meme subs with high ranks in tags for 'Funny', 'Cute', and 'CAT' though that might not be the case if they participate in say a chemistry QnA community.

As these scores are created over time based on each users contributions (post AND comment reputation is the same thing) to the sub as scored by other people's tag selections for that users posts. The more it aligns with the community, the greater their contribution score.

Does this mean that toxic communities can form that exclude people based on reputation tags that the toxic community detests?

Unfortunately yes, that is one of the flaws of the system.

THOUGH

The fact it is contained by community means that a high rep person in an anti-trans community will not have any carryover reputation when joining a community they wish to brigade or degrade the quality of content, and their tag history will make it easy to determine their genuine engagement.

I think it would be better to have like a currency system where posts that are kept alive the longest trigger points, not just how many people upvote them. But then, you should be able to use those points to do something instead of hoarding them like a dragon's treasure or maybe turn them in to awards. If OTHER people give you awards, that's what you should have on display, not just how many upvotes you had. This would also give you more points for helping smaller communities create meaningful content instead of what's popular.

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.)

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”.

Edit: lol

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.

User scores are bad. Up/downvotes are bad.

The whole point of them was to create a flow of content with minimum human intervention. That’s a huge goal and The Dream if you’re making money off social media. If you’re not making money off social media then it’s not doing you any good.

Abolish karma, abolish comment and post scores.