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
What we have right now in Lemmy strikes the current balance IMO. Individual comments are upvoted/downvoted. But no cumulative score.
which is the right thing, judge the opinion not the person
There is that aspect of karma of “if you’ve got negative karma, you’re probably intolerable” but I’m not sure how much that helps in practice vs just banning people. Karma can also filter out fresh accounts for high spam communities, ofc, that doesn’t work perfectly either…
This wouldn’t work in the fediverse anyway, as it’d even easier to fake your user karma here (on an own instance).
I agree 90%, downvotes shouldn’t have that much weight. That said, comments which are abusive or hateful probably should have long term consequences for the user, even if they are themselves not worthy of a ban. Maybe reputation can be a “strike” for number of reported comments.
To be clear, here I’m thinking of “dogwhistle” comments which individually are plausibly fine, but in aggregate indicate this person is up to no good.
On the other hand, kbin has a cumulative score, but currently implements it badly wrong. Your cumulative ‘reputation’ is calculated as “boosts - downvotes”. So if you post a thread that gets 100 upvotes, 9 downvotes, 80 comments and 5 boosts, you are rewarded with ‘-4 reputation’. Nobody really uses boost, so it is very easy to rack up negative reputation.
Thankfully, I don’t think ‘reputation’ actually does anything, but it is still kind of annoying to be ‘punished’ for posting.
I would almost say a better system would obscure usernames completely. Only show the comment text, and allow voting accordingly.
No, we need people to have some accountability or everyone’s just gonna be intolerable.
Federation already makes that completely impossible.
I don’t agree with the lack of usernames of course. There’s no community when there is no way to associate posts with individuals.
It’s not impossible. Each user is still tied to an instance, they still have usernames, etc.
But an individual can be any user on any instance. Even one of their own creation.