Can someone explain to me how kbins reputation system works?

TooL@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 121 points –

Because currently, it seems like the only thing it's recording are downvotes. Meanwhile upvotes are completely ignored, leading to pretty much every profile I see having a negative reputation.

Also, I have a very fragile ego and my -6 reputation hurts a bit.

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The reputation system is awful. It's actually enough to get me to stop using the platform, because - unless you dig in to my comment history and see the upvotes - it looks like more people disagree with me than not.

Logically I know it's untrue (and it wouldn't matter if it were), but reddit gamified both the attempt to gain popularity AND the dissemination of it. Because of that, huge numbers of people treat internet points as an actual indication of a person's value. I left reddit a long time ago, and that was one of the major reasons.

I don't want to have my thoughts on a topic discounted because of a clerical error coupled with too much emphasis on counterfeit updoots. I especially don't want to become an outcast because of a flood of downvotes from people who can't tell the difference between "someone they disagree with" and "a bad person". We're building a new community, we should take this opportunity to build a better one.

Why do you care so much for an ethereal reputation system that has no meaningful consequences to you in actual reality?

Reputation will vary by which instance you're on because it's just a calculation of actions people have made, and those counts vary based on who subscribed to whom and when. If you're on instance B and instance A and C are talking to you, but defederated from each other, you could be +100 when looking from A and -100 when looking from C. So the score will be increasingly meaningless-looking the more you are federated.