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 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.

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.

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.

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”.

I still firmly believe one of the worst things to happen to the internet, besides pop-up ads, is up and down votes. Nothing exposes a misanthrope quicker than forcing them to comment instead of passively downvoting everything they see. Which makes it easier to remove them from the party.

How about expanding the votes into multiple kinds of karma. Make it possible to place several votes: "on topic/off topic", "funny/boring", "shit post", "solution to the question", "agree/disagree", "political", "Interesting", "Spam", "Original Content", etc.

Communities could create whatever rating is suitable for their forum.

Sort of like tags, but votable.

It would basically reward everyone for what they do (being a level 7 funny shitposter is something) but at the same time making it possible for others to filter out anything they don't care about. So instead of clicking downvote because of disagreement or upvote because it's funny, there would be an outlet for that in its own vote.

I feel that would make it easier to find quality content whether you're looking for serious debate or the hottest memes.

We'd need better comment filtering on individual communities, and it could/would be abused, but overall it would be facilitate the possibility of having different kinds of conversations on the same topic.

Sometimes I want to read funny stuff in serious topics and sometimes there is serious stuff in funny threads, and sometimes people write clever stuff that I disagree with and so on. One vote is just not enough.