Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
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”.
I think the idea of sacrificing your own “good boi points” to downvote a post bring a new layer of complexity. For sure, the hive-mind effect would be attenuated if users had to sacrifice their own “points”, and, probably, the downvoting as a whole would be less used. What do you guys think about how the use of the downvote would change?
Oh I doubt anyone would implement that as a system, but it is interesting to speculate what it might change. Imagine all the downvote curmudgeons having to regularly post pictures of kittens to /c/aww in order to recharge their karma.
I rarely downvoted on Reddit because I’m pretty sure everyone (no matter how blasé they appear to be) gets more upset by a comment ending up at -1 than they would get pleased by it ending at +5. When I found that some instances here don’t even have the downvote button, I decided that I wasn’t going to use it here at all. If someone says something damaging to the conversation I’ll report it to the mods, if they say something factually incorrect I might correct them, but otherwise I will just move on.
I do like that. Perhaps an exponential factor where if you downvote 10 comments you lose 1 karma, downvote 20 you lose 10 karma, etc.