This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general.
I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model.
An online community can be like a village, where you have familiar faces, collective experiences, shared values and so forth.
As karma mattered more you lost a whole subset of regular posters that felt kamra took a relaxing pastime and made it into a job. Karma was used as a kind of stopgap for the issue of managing the cacophony in a busy thread, which made the points matter even more and caused even more people to disengage.
Personally, I found that karma led to self-censorship of any idea that remotely deviated from the group consensus.
Ofc! whats the point of posting anything when you have people actively work to suppress your thoughts and statements?
Really user-based meta-moderation had been pretty much a disaster, not sure we need internet points at all, things worked great without them.
Can you think of alternatives to voting, though? Sorting always requires some curating system that isn’t random but I can’t think of any that would be robust to group consensus
I don’t think user voting in of itself is a problem. It’s the consequences of large negative voting that causes the real problems. In Reddit, a single unpopular comment on a popular subreddit could send a casual Redditor into negative karma which effectively shadowbans them from Reddit. As a result, you see people deleting their comments to stop the bleeding. Controversial opinions are punished severely.
Fair enough. I always assumed downvotes were used to weed out/shadow-ban troll accounts more than suppress unpopular opinions but I’ve never seen that measure reduce the number of trolls in the long run