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.

I think voting has the potential to be very useful but what we want to move away from is the reactionary "I disagree with you / dislike your post, so downvote"

One experiment I would like to see is requiring a reason when downvoting. Factually incorrect, violates this magazine's civility code, trolling, etc. Some reasons might have overlap with the report feature, so a downvote for e.g. illegal content might automatically notify the moderators as well. This might be contingent on a feature that can impose restrictions for abuse of the report feature.

Although it is already relatively easy for anyone to notice when an account is blanket downvoting a thread. In theory, it's already a bit easier for users to sniff out bad actors because they'll either have a clear pattern of misbehavior or a conspicuous lack of account age or participation

Subs should be able to force sort by controversial for comments and/or posts.

Any damn fool can come up with comments that are universally approved of, or universally hated. They aren't interesting.

The phrase 'trivially true' applies - "This crime was a bad thing, and the people responsible shouldn't have done it! I am very angry at them!" may be emotionally satisfying to say or to cheer on, but it doesn't add a damn thing to the conversation, any more than "hur hur suck it libruls" does.

There isn't a term for the inverse of ragebait, but there needs to be. All the le reddit moments - the tedious meme-chains, forced in-jokes, etc.

For subs where you want interesting discussion, you want to sort both to the bottom. It's the posts that divide opinions that are worth talking about, almost by definition. If a post has a thousand votes but the total is close to zero, well hey, that's probably worth seeing and engaging wth.

Let people vote with their heart, use upvotes/downvotes however the fuck they want to instead of constantly nagging and whining about it - and then use that to detect and de-prioritise mediocrity.

It wouldn't be appropriate for all subs, but for some places, I think it'd be a huge improvement.

We need the karma-equivalent of PageRank. Every vote should not be treated the same, just as Google doesn't weight every link equally. The "one user one vote" system is the equivalent of pre-Google search engines that would rank pages by how many times they contained the search term. But it can't be as simple as "votes from higher-karma users are worth more" because the easiest way to build insane karma is to build a bot or spam low-effort replies to every rising post. Still, the system needs to be able to extract the wisdom of the crowd from the stupidity of the crowd, and the only way to do that is to apply a weighting gradient to users and their votes.

Downvotes only so karma whores never comment, and completely random monthly account bannings so no one gets too comfortable.

If there has to be something then probably karma that is strictly for the past month of activities. It's not permanent so there's no point in people accumulating it to sell or trying to karma whore. This way it also has an indication that could still help people identify trolls at a glance.

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.

It's very easily abused. Does Karma affect article and comment visibility on Reddit? I don't know the details, but if so I'd suggest that it not do so here. Maybe just have it be a number calculated from boosts, upvotes and downvotes that you can see on the profile if you are a mod trying to determine if someone tends to troll, but not something that has any affect on whether or not your stuff is displayed.

I'm not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?

I found a reputation in my profile of "1" but I don't have a clue where that came from. I'm not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).

Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I'm just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called "reputation" on my profile. What does it do in a best case?

Non-algorithmic ordering, auto-collapse replies after a certain user-preferred setting.