Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.
Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account’s quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human “bot hunter” accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots “stealing” content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.
I really wish the karma didn’t come with the downsides of bots. I wouldn’t be opposed to a system like the one reddit had with awards where the instances can take a cut of the award purchases. It’s nice to have a way to promote good OC on a platform and it solves a lot of what I don’t like about the karma.
I don’t really care about karma or reputation points. However, I really enjoy having a community where you can upvote and downvote.
Technically, lemmy does actually track a user’s karma.
It’s- just not exposed via the user interface… as of right now.
Kinda of like how kbin displays who upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy also tracks this data too, and can easily report on exactly who is upvoting and downvoting.
In the case of this post, for example-
In the case of karma- Its all there too.
Comment Karma
Comment Negative Karma.
And- post karma exists too.
Oh dear. I am disappointed to see that. I can understand the point of scoring posts and comments, but what’s the point of keeping a score for the user? Is there a use for it now, or is it being kept just in case there’s a use for it later?
Hopefully it will not get exposed in the UI.
It’s necessary because the website is transparent, if you were to federate with an instance, you’d need this information in order to moderate your instance, in order to check for bots, and various other things, that’s the only reason it exists.
For votes to work, the data of who voted where has to be tracked.
Karma is just a matter of adding numbers together.
I think the data can be useful for anti spam reasons
How are you supposed to comment or post to earn Karma if you’re blocked because of having low Karma?! It is also bad for new users.
I am disappointed by this. Karma ruins whole discussions, and I hope the devs never add something bloody dreadful like that.
It’s necessary because the website is transparent, if you were to federate with an instance, you’d need this information in order to moderate your instance, in order to check for bots, and various other things, that’s the only reason it exists.
Just like on Reddit, I don’t care. As long as it’s not tied to my ability to interact with the community then let them have their silly internet points.
One annoying thing on some subreddits was moderators auto-removing your posts unless you had a certain amount of karma.
The throttles are really useful. But I agree on the first post and the removals.
A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It’s easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.
No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are mostly a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a “good vibes only, no criticism allowed” type of environment.
Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn’t have a broken social credit system.
There was an idea from blahaj.zone who considered making down votes enabled, but have less “weight” compared to upvotes. It sounded pretty interesting but I don’t think they implemented it yet.
Could you link that? I don’t see an obvious benefit, but it sounds interesting.
I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.
I’ve seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.
I like that the total values of both votes are shown. It’s better than the way reddit has it at least.
Agreed, Reddit used to show up/down counts but got rid of it and I thought that was a stupid choice on their part. Reddit also did other weird manipulations to the upvote count on posts which I’m glad we don’t have here.
People tend to upvote and believe anything that already has a lot of upvotes. Seeing downvotes is a good red flag to warn users to not blindly believe everything they see with positive karma.
I think the current system is harder to manipulate than reddit
I think it’s overall a good feature, but it’s also a bit unfortunate that you can’t vote based on the score that you think something should have, without that vote carrying an additional (unintended) meaning.
Like if someone gives a poorly thought out but otherwise good faith opinion. Maybe it has a score of -50 but it only deserves -10. Now my upvote might be seen as proof that at least one other discussion participant supports that opinion, when that’s not actually the case.
It is weird that we vote like that. I find myself bringing a lot of good faith comments back up from 0 not because I agree with it, but because I think it is a comment worth 1 upvote lol
I think the system on Reddit was pretty terrible and ripe for abuse. Over the years I saw a lot of threads where people discussed being harassed by another user who disagreed with them in a sub, and then proceeded to hunt down their posts and down-vote every single thing they posted across the site. Downvotes for literally no reason other than some irrational dislike of someone they don’t even know, etc. Conversely, lots of high karma posters who never really contributed anything other than low effort posts like memes and pics.
I think having and using the upvote/downvote system is a very poor tool for promoting critical thinking and open discussion. Even posts that contain opinions that seem horrid to the majority of others commenting in a thread discussion can still have value as they can help illustrate the world is larger than the little bubble present in a thread and sub of like minded people where only those who agree with each others’ ideas are given value.
Already disliking that I see the upvote/downvote buttons present on kbin as well as reputation points, so not really even sure I will be engaging long term tbh. Have stated before in other comments that I don’t think it wise to just recreate the systems in Reddit since we will just end up in the same place, with the same issues. We should be better than that. Feel free to downvote now. ;)
I do wonder though what a better alternative might be (and if this has been studied at all). It’s fundamentally an issue with people being emotional and often quite bad at separating their own personal feeling from their voting. I know some platforms simply disable downvotes, which partially solves the issue, but at the same time, I think there is some value in communities being able to downvote spam or genuinely poor content. Maybe if you had to also make a comment - thus upping the amount of effort required - it’d be better?
Kbin does also have the quirk that votes are actually public, so you can actually tell if someone is following you around downvoting everything. That could potentially be seen as a rule violation and lead to being banned from an instance.
While probably computationally too expensive, I would like some system where up/downvoting isn’t about objective quality, but only about personal preference. Essentially the system would “cluster” up/downvote behavior from users like youtube clusters like/dislike of videos and then recommend posts which people who like the same content as you like and people who dislike content you like dislike. I am not sure how many clusters/dimensions you would need though and I guess individualized sorting would quickly become computationally prohibitive as you would have to do a scalar multiplication of the post-dimensions with the user-dimensions for each post and then sort the stuff.
That’s an interesting idea, though I’m wary of the risk of funneling users into echo chambers. Just think of YouTube around 2016 when every gaming video led you down a rabbit hole of Gamergate to Ben Shapiro and ultimately raw white supremacy.
I never cared about karma points at all. I just said what I was thinking. Only annoying thing on Reddit was when you didn’t have any karma at all.
People begin downvoting your post now, because you don’t care. lol
We need them for better distributed moderation of spam
I don’t care for Karma-farming, but I liked having some way to tell if someone was a real community member or a throw-away account. I liked that there were some subreddits that wouldn’t let you post if you had low karma because it helped hold back the trolls.
It also deterred real posters, like a lot of overly ruled subs did.
Karma as used on Reddit is fairly useless. A web-of-trust style karma system (do people whose opinions I respect also respect this person’s opinions) would be helpful for sifting through the crap.
I kinda like that idea, but wouldn’t that also cause a lot of divide and some sort of echo chambers to grow?
Echo chambers are caused by exposure to only one POV. I suppose WoT karma could be used to build an even more insular echo chamber if someone wanted that.
But I am talking about valuing a person’s critical thinking skills, their ability to formulate and express reasonable opinions whether or not I agree with their specific conclusions. If that person finds something challenging, interesting, or fruitful then I want to read it, too.
The problem with downvotes is they’re supposed to be used to push irrelevant things down and bring forward the “productive conversation”, but…
…it’s easier to use them as an “I disagree with you, get lost loser” button, and I feel like that doesn’t usually help the discussion. And upvotes already bring up the good comments (although sometimes the most voted stuff is just memes and you miss the interesting stuff).
While you’re right that that’s a downside of downvotes, I think that it’s far better than the alternative.
Downvotes means we have a way to discourage really bad behavior and lets others see that it’s discouraged. For example, suppose someone posts something bigoted. It sucks to see those kinda comments (especially when they affect you personally). When those comments are heavily downvoted, it feels better, since it tells you that the views expressed in the comment are not acceptable. It’s extremely discouraging when I see bigoted posts with a positive score. Without downvoting, they all have positive scores and it’s just “less positive”.
It’d be nice if reporting was able to remove such comments before anyone sees them, but that will never be the case. Too many communities don’t remove comments fast enough and many more simply won’t remove comments unless they’re really bad, if at all. Some moderators are bigots themselves and others simply don’t have the ability to recognize dog whistles that may be in comments. Or they’re not personally affected by the malicious comment, so they can be more easily convinced that if the comment was politely worded, it’s acceptable even if it’s blatantly bigoted.
To be clear, it does suck that users will use it as a disagree button for comments that are otherwise good, but that is far, far worth it. The presence of downvotes were a major reason why I used Reddit (and now this) while disliking the likes of twitter.
Make it so you have to spend reputation to downvote, people would downvote less for disagree and more for bad content
I like the thought behind this idea but I don’t think it’s a good solution. It requires having a reputation score, which I think outweighs the positives here. I could also see people trying to play this system in a couple different ways, which is just plain bad for discussion culture: encourage others to downvote something without spending the reputation yourself, or collect downvotes with bait content in order to eat through other peoples reputation.
I disagree, get lost loser!
Jk I love your cat profile photo ❤️
Would separate votes for agreeing/disagreeing, and separate for relevance work?
My local newspaper attempted “well argumented” and “agree/disagree” scores years ago. Later they removed the “agree” score, and I recall some accusations of orwellian moderation, but I think this is a cool idea that deserves more experimentation.
Also, clearly naming the upvotes and downvotes might affect their usage.
Maybe something like voting “funny” or “useful” etc. like in Steam reviews. That could also help with the meme response sorting problem.
I would prefer a platform without karma or reputation. The way reputation works on Kbin isn’t great anyway. Downvotes lower it but upvotes don’t raise it. My rep is low because most people don’t boost.
A karma/rep system can disincentivize participation as well. I don’t think it’s necessary to keep trolls at bay.
The way reputation works on Kbin isn’t great anyway.
That’s because it has a bug. They changed upvotes from boost -> like to be compatible with Lemmy. The reputation calculation hasn’t been updated yet. It probably will be soon. Might even have a PR already.
After reading your comment I realized I didn’t know there was a reputation mechanic and what boost even does. Is there a faq somewhere for this type of thing?
I think boost is like a retweet? I’ll look around to see if anyone ever explained it all.
From reading an earlier thread, I believe the boost feature makes more sense when you think about federating with Mastadon which has a reblog thing going on. So you’d get a boost to your rep if someone shared your content on mastodon.
Additionally, Kbin is planning to change the rep system to be based on up and down votes instead—it just isn’t a priority right now. Something something check the GitHub for details.
I just boosted your comment by clicking boost. No idea what it does but you have a shiny (1) next to boost now.
I upvoted and boosted you arbitrarily because everything is fake anyway!
I personally prefer Kbin over lemmy for a few different reasons. But reputation isn’t one of them. I forget it even exists.
Literally just learned that it exists today from this post.
i learned about it because i noticed my profile has -1 reputation. i didn’t even know this existed. I agree with others, karma on reddit was stupid and people used low karma as a way to gatekeep subs. you couldn’t post until you have 100 karma, that sort of thing. It’s bad for business in my opinion.
Fundamentally, karma limits were mostly used as an anti-spam measure, if a rather crude one. I was actually a mod of a couple relatively large subs, and while I did feel bad for the impact on new users, the benefit from how much spam we caught with it made it ultimately worthwhile. There very well may be better approaches out there though, and I am excited to see how things grow here, but it is going to be a problem that the Fediverse will face as well.