!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
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.
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.
Score the posts, not the individuals. Attaching imaginary points to any kind of activity instantly turns it into a competition.
Instead, any scoring should focus on actual content, which is basically what the up/down vote is.
Advogato reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato#Trust_metric
Added: also, Slashdot.org karma worked sort of like reddit karma except 1) you couldn't see anyone's karma except your own, and 2) it only had 5 or so levels, topping out at "excellent". It took a few dozen good posts to reach excellent, and there was no point to whoring after you reached that level. Posts were ranked by upvotes/downvotes and went from -2 to +5. Anonymous posts started out at 0, posts from registered users with non-negative karma started at 1, and posts from registered users with good or higher karma started at 2. There were some more complications including voting "insightful", "funny", etc. and there was "meta moderation" where you could judge the accuracy of other people's votes. Usefully, you could select "filter out all posts rated below N" where you could choose N. Looking at just the 5-rated posts gave you a quick overview of the worthwhile thoughts on that topic. There were often 1000+ comments in a thread, so no way to read them all, but reading the few dozen top ones was generally enlightening.
Oh yes I remember, you could only vote on posts if you were a moderator (in their sense of the term) at that moment. Moderators were picked at random on a daily basis from the population of users with positive karma, or something similar. You got five "mod points" which you could spend on voting on posts, i.e. you could only rate 5 posts during your day as a mod, rather than all the posts you saw. You tended to get mod points once a month or so. It has been a long time since I spent any time there, so my memory is a bit hazy. It went down the tubes for a while, though recently it has looked better.
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.
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”.
Surely by the same logic upvoting without providing a reason for it should also be decentivised - why should negative feedback require taking the time to explain "why", whilst positive feedback would not - logically either they both require a "why" or none does.
An uneven posture when it comes to receiving feedback only makes sense if one is emotionally impacted by "somebody disagreed with me and didn't told me why" and having such a socially fragile ego is really the problem of that person, not of everybody else.
More generally and as I pointed out in a long post which I made in the other Karma thread (which I will not repeat here), the removing (or punishing) downvotes is just a strategy to incentivise more content posting, no matter how mediocre, which in turn leads to a a lower signal to noise ratio (i.e. more mindles fluff less content) which is bad for everybody - no-work negative criticism (i.e. downvotes without the need to spend time making explanatory posts) are quite an effective way of providing feedback on the shoddiness of something without the artificial barrier against criticism which is to require spending time on an explanation - I mean, if 1 or 2 downvotes get to you, then you definitelly have emotional issues you need to explore with an expert in such things as a handful of anonymous "I don't like that" can be easilly dismissed as "there are a handful of people who disagree with what I wrote (so what?!)", whilst an unexpected 10 or 20+ downvotes are often a pretty good hint to think again about what your published.
It seems to me that it's incredibly selfish and self-centred to demand that everybody else takes the time to write an explanation when you write something they disagree with: other people's time is their own and they do not exist merelly to serve your ego just as you don't exist merelly to serve theirs.
Mind you, I do think it would be fair for there to be some way for people to disable viewing of downvotes on their account, as people with such "sensitivity" to negative feedback deserve to be able to participate in social media just like everybody else.
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).
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
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 had a twinge of regret the first time I realized that my Lemmy account didn't have a cumulative tally. Then I realized I didn't actually want. I am better off without the gamification of everything - especially social interaction. It doesn't really serve a purpose outside of gatekeeping, and if we put it in for the purpose of gatekeeping I think we'd all agree (at least those of us who where bot-modded back in reddit) that it's a poor substitute for human intervention in keeping bots and bad actors out.