Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points.
Post is here
Reputation Points.
Karma?
Embrace the change!
I’m not touting it, it’s a decent way to make sure that an account is reputable and behaving in a way conducive to the principles of the communities it’s participating in - “upvotes” means people like the things they are posting and saying which means they are good users. It’s just a little …familiar.
upvote or downvote are not good indicator of the quality of a post. a controversial point of view can be of quality but still being downvoted.
I understand what you’re saying, but in a general sense, a person with good “Reputation Points” can be seen as contributing positively in the communities they are in. Even posting a controversial opinion and getting downvoted to hell (which I have done before on reddit) won’t kill a person’s Reputation Points / Karma. I’m still torn on whether it’s a positive or not, but it can definitely used as an indicator of whether a person is being a positive member of the site.
However, @PositiveNoise brings up some of the negative points as well. Another being that it reinforces an echo chamber of ideas and stifles discussion, with unpopular but well-fashioned arguments being downvoted because they’re disliked, not because they’re harmful. And further, repost bots got tons of karma on reddit, upvoted by people who didn’t see it the first time, which reduces the quality of the sub / community / magazine by burying OC that couldn’t compete against an already proven successful picture / tweet / meme / etc.
It’s a conversation. There are arguments for both sides imo.
Honestly, I hope the UI adds a built-in option to hide upvotes and downvotes (seeing the vote totals and having the up and down arrows visible to click on). I know there are pros and cons of reputation systems, but I think that’s why it makes sense for each user to decide whether or not they want to be aware of that stuff. I’ve always been pretty disturbed by the ‘popularity contest’ nature of social media, and think that for myself, the slight mental health hit of paying attention to my reputation and the up/down votes of every comment is something I’d rather avoid, at least much of the time.
I’m aware that there are some scripts or some such that can do this, but I’m not extra tech savvy, and many people are less tech savvy than me, so having a simple setting would be great.
Having said that, it’s great that the latest revision to the system went live. It now seems a lot more intuitive.
