NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin
3 years ago by frasassi to c/kbinMeta
Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:
In addition to that, Ernest stated that "there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It's just info in the profile" (link)
I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.
I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.
Reddit turned into an echo chamber because of karma, people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma. The downvote feature itself being misused there too.
Reputation should be hidden or removed imo, keep the up/downs/boosts for sorting.
I feel we still need the reputation system, based on the fact that upvotes/downvotes get abused. Everyone always wants to give their 2 cents with how they feel about a comment if it invokes something in them, and upvotes/downvotes give them that power. As long as reputation doesn't effect comment/post exposure then we should be fine.
If only the boost option exists and reputation is scrapped, I believe boost will be abused in the same manor as upvotes and downvotes do on Reddit.
Providing people with an outlet still to say "I agree with this person" or "this comment is stupid or I just don't like it" I think will help mitigate the abuse of the post exposure system.
I do agree with others thoughts that reputation on a post/comment should be invisible though.
people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma
Critical difference. Reddit had groupthink literally enforced by the software. If you had negative karma in a subreddit and you tried to post, it would say "You are doing that too much, please wait 8 minutes to post again", even if your last post was 2 weeks ago.
I suggested a resetting score elsewhere in here, but I really like this system. Kinda reminds me of Steam's "recent reviews" score. Would let people have a general gist of your recent behaviour. This would allow people to get better or worse and have their score reflect that, instead of one really positive/negative post in their history skewing their score for eternity.
There are already a lot of userscripts floating around to customize the appearance of kbin, I'm sure it'll be trivial to hide the reputation score if you don't want to see it.
Bear in mind that the Fediverse is inherently transparent. Your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted publicly via ActivityPup, so someone can come up with a way to summarize your reputation score even if your "home" instance isn't showing it to them.
If it does have to return, I'd like it to wipe regularly. Every 3 months or 6 months everyone goes back to zero. Give EVERYONE the same "badge" that just says "so and so was here in year X" or whatever and leave it at that.
Or go back to what forums did and only count post count and word count and turn those into EXP.
I actually prefer having a visible scoring system in place. Things like that can be red flags that indicate whether or not somebody is participating in a discussion in bad faith. If you take a cursory glance through somebody's profile and see that they're constantly stirring up trouble and being a bother to people, you know not to waste your energy dealing with them.
Obviously it's not a perfect solution for that situation, and doesn't apply in all scenarios (trolls can also be good karma farmers, too), but it's an extra indicator that can help determine somebody's true motives in a discussion.
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I almost wish reputation and things of that nature weren’t publicly visible. A huge part of Reddit that I hated, the circlejerk-y opinions and same tired lame jokes being told over and over again, were caused in large part by people seeking karma (and that’s not even addressing the actual posts, just the stuff in the comments). I would hate to see that eventually start to come back.
There’s obviously some downside to that and it probably warrants a more nuanced solution if anything.
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