Honestly it's pretty good to have the transparency of who is up voting, and down voting. Makes it easier to figure out who's farming or not. It's pretty good against the trolls too imo.

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

Personally i like to call em WIP. Worthless internet points. Just to be clear i cherish my WIP. I would never disrespect my WIP. That's just my name for it.

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

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.

I loved forums, and we didn't have anything, except for 'total posts' and 'total replies' for users. I like that.

I do like upvoting, but I think karma should be hidden. Maybe if you go to user profile and click a button to see the value. It should not show if you hover over the user in a discussion, like Reddit. This is too much incentive for Karma farming.

I don't like downvotes, and that's the reason I'm on lemmy.one - no downvotes here at all

Not really sure what you think is wrong with karma? most of reddit's problem IMO come down to bad moderation.

But for comment scoring, there are really just 3 methods I've seen:

• Generic Up/Downvote - Reddit
• Categorized Up/Downvote - Slashdot - This worked on a technical forum to keep technical knowledge near the top, while still allowing stupid/funny comments further down the page, plus it made ignoring stupid/funny threads easy
• Personalized Up/Downvote - Facebook/Twitter/etc - basically build a profile of users you agree/interact with, and then weight their interactions accordingly to predict what content you'll like/hate.
  • I believe Ticktok take this to the next level, because 90% of users don't up/downvote, ticktok logs the passive act of continuing to watch content as a partial upvote making their algorithms train on the average users likes/dislikes faster.

You could probably combine Personalized & Categorized, but I've AFAIK not seen it done.

I think the problems with moderation are harder to solve, because you have both bad-faith moderators & good-faith but easily played moderators as problems, and you also want different dynamics as forums grow.

I think lemmy could really experiment with good moderation & meta-moderation and if the developers are interested anyway, be a far better forum as a result.

• Peer review of moderator decisions is something Slashdot did that went quite well. Once you'd been an active user with good "karma" for a while you would occasionally be asked to review other users votes, I think a similar thing could be done for moderation decisions
• Elected mods. For subs above a certain size, having moderation essentially boil down to whatever the guy who created the sub decides, is bad. I don't know exactly how it would work to prevent abuse, but as subs grow, at some point it would be good if the community chose the mods.
  • even short of full fledged democracy community approval of mod appointments would certainly reduce the amount of mod drama where it 1 bad head mod, will purge the other mods and replace them all with sock puppets.
• Users-led replacement of bad mods, similar to electing mods, it would be good for users to "recall" a bad mod.
• Transparency over mod actions, I understand that with the number of Nazis & other assorted trolls online reddit chose to let mods, moderate anonymously, but it really means you have no idea who is doing a good/bad job in many subreddits, some level of transparency for all but the worst content is key.
• Moving subs, as lemmy instances have some control over the content of the subs that reside on them, it would make sense for there to be some method for the users + mods of a sub to decide to move it to another instances. This not only prevents admin abuse, but also encourages competition between instances for technical administration & content administration.
• Splitting communities , sometimes subs grow "too big" and have different subcommunities that end up fighting for control of a sub, it would be good if there were a way of these communities splitting into 2 rather than fighting over the original name. not sure how it would work, but thinking about how r/trees & r/cannabis split or something similar. Maybe /r/canabis could become an combo of /r/canabisnews & /r/canabismemes, where users can just ubsub from the 1/2 of the content they don't want.
• Letting users weight subs/filter subs how much of subs they see, sometimes I've unsubbed from a high-content sub, just because while i liked the content it was overpowering the rest of my feed, it would be nice to have users configure how much of a sub they see (especially if combined with Categorized Up/Downvote), rather than complaining about "bad moderation" I can just personally choose to see less of what I don't want.

Anyway thank you for reading/not-reading my ted talk, but I suspect this will come up again so now I can copy/pasta it.

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.

Honestly, I find the entire system annoying and counter to fostering real discussions.

If you go to a party, it's not like people in the room have tags over their heads which say "trustworthy," "troll," "crazy," or whatever else. You have to make up your own mind based on your interactions and (hopefully) use of critical thinking to decide if someone you are talking with is worth your time.

If I don't want to take the time to read anything which might offend me, put me off, make me uncomfortable, challenge me, or just in some way be contrary to my world view then frankly, online forums would not be the spaces in which I would be reading things.

I believe that everyone has a point of view that can have value in some way, if only to illustrate that "negative" or "contrary to me" view and people exist around me. They have voices to contribute. Deciding if their contributions are valuable enough to award them a positive or negative "Reputation" is not an abstract thing. A true reputation takes time to build in the real world. It is earned for better or for worse, by actions people take over time not by some arbitrary number farmed by a bot posting cat memes 24/7 or whatever, or posting viewpoints sure to garner upvotes because like minded people are the only ones replying.

I like it as it is to be honest.

I'd just like.. users have a comment count

and a post count

simply.

some people like to make posts

some like to just comment (this is mostly me)

i can also live without it but.. if there absolutely have to be something..

i dont like "karma" on reddit

Why not keep the scores hidden and just use them to order stuff?

I was thinking maybe some kind of ranking system like Street Fighter 6?

I know everyone seems to be hating karma but I do like that dopamine release. Ofx it will get abused... but what if there are just tiers, rather than seeing a number go up.

And at the highest tier, it doesn't matter anymore. That was you can see who is most active and it kind of gives just a bit of prestige. Furthermore, you won't see a number going up forever, so after awhile it's not like you want to keep gaming the system to see the number go up. But at the same time you can feel some some of progression.

Anyways, it's just a random thought I had as I am grinding on SF6 today haha. I could easily do without karma but it's just a thought.

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.