What other less-toxic system could work instead of karma?

VGarK@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 39 points –

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

195

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

That real question is, what problem are we trying to solve? Then we can go from there.

In wondering about that myself. What is the problem?

Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.

You can check their post history? Karma doesn't tell you anything, really. Mine went up tenfold one day just because I replied to what ended up as the top post in a top thread in a much bigger sub than those I normally post in. Some people spend all their time in big subs making short, smart remarks that get a lot of karma, others spend their time in enemy territory battling people they disagree with. Some toxic people have a lot of karma because they hang out in toxic subs.

The problem to be solved is how to order threads. Old skool bulletin boards just bump the most recently replied one to the top. Which works well on an old skool bulletin board as long as it isn't too large, but very badly on a big site where a few big active threads can drown out all the others.

I don't know what the solution is. But the numbers don't mean anything without checking the context. Karma is useful for ordering threads/comments, and giving users a bit of dopamine when they get some attention. But there (probably) are better ways to do it.

I don't even know that karma/upvotes are good for ordering threads or comments. It just encourages gamification, group think, and snark.

I'd say get rid of down votes, replace upvotes with emoji reacts, and sort based on reacts + replies, but that's probably just encouraging gamification, group think, and snark, too.

Reddit, like other centralized social networks that are trying to monetize us, prioritizes time on site and generic "engagement". Those are what generate the most money for the company.

They're not what's best for us as users.

Maybe what we need to do is allow users to quickly and easily hide comment chains - not just collapse them, but dismiss them entirely - and allow for user-scriptable and shareable sorting algorithms. We drop down votes entirely, because they're just used passive-aggressively anyway, make blocking users as easy as possible, with temp blocks and notification silences at the ready, and then forget about user reputation points entirely, because they're as meaningless as Dragonball Z power levels.

The thing is, high karma on Reddit doesn't mean someone has a history of thoughtful engagement. Just as often, if not more, it means someone whose well timed with zingers on popular posts.

And incentivising that kind of take-down behaviour actually creates toxic communities.

I agree with you that high karma doesn’t indicate anything besides popularity, but someone with negative karma is almost certainly either a troll or a political extremist of some sort.

This is why it’s useful at the account level. It’s also useful at the post level in order to build a sorting algorithm which raises the most engaging/important/interesting submissions to the top. Within a community it is important to help define what that community is - irrelevant and low effort content is suppressed and relevant/high-effort gets boosted. Moderators can enforce this by just removing and pinning too, but that’s almost always too unilateral, and the voting system is generally better because it’s expected that then you get a representation of how people in that community feel about it. It’s a good system.

I can imagine some tweaks to help improve how karma is implemented:

  • Use Bayesan Inference to produce a 'shit/shinola score' for contributors instead simple up/down vote totals

  • Experiment with different recency biases for the score; you can trust that people will change over time

  • Generally figure out what you'll be using karma for and make sure you have a way to measure how well it's working

I’ve googled Bayesan Interference, however I don’t understand what you meant by it. Could you elaborate please :)

Here is a good general explanation of Bayesian inference.

I think @jayrhacker@kbin.social is suggesting using such techniques to predict "troll" or "not troll" given the posting history/removed comments/etc. My personal thought is that whatever system replaces karma, it should be understandable to the typical user. I think its possible Bayesian inference could be used in developing the system, but the end system should be explainable without it.

Thanks for the link. To anyone that does’t know about Bayesian inference, do check it out!

Now I have an existencial crisis thanks to the video 😂 the funny part is that thats the same thing used to detect spam email…

Spam detectors are pretty opaque by their nature. In contrast, karma is pretty easy to understand: "x number of people upvoted comments or posts from this user". This lets people understand a score even if they don't agree. If a karma replacement behaved like a spam detector, it would probably just annoy people.

Sporting brackets may be a better analogy. They are developed with statistics in mind but are understandable to the average sports fan. I think a karma replacement should have similar properties.

That sounds awesome! You seem to be quite knowledgeable about mathematics. May I ask what is your background?

Computer science. However, statistics is more of a hobby than anything. I am just intrigued by the idea of federated social media in general so I have thought a bit on how I would personally make it work. Perhaps I will make some more in depth blog posts about my ideas at some point.

Good point, take my:

handshake, pat on the back, slightly too long hug point thingy.

Yeah, the question strikes me as, "Reddit has this thing. A lot of people don't like that thing, but how could we still have it without people not liking it?"

I think we're good as is.

There are few things Karma system helps with that come to mind.

For others:

  • Reputation
  • Activity

For you:

  • That endorphin XP boost when you level up. Makes you more likely do engage after the first hit.
  • Gives you an idea how your comment has been received by others.

Presumably there are other things as well, these just quickly came to me.

That is a good way to think about it. What is the need from the reader's perspective and from the poster's.

One would certainly read a post with low upvotes from a author with high reputation if you are interested in the specific magazine. I wonder if the reputation should not be topic bound and not just general. That would be useful from the reader's perspective.

Some kind of implementation of what you said would solve Reddit's problem of mods reposting and deleting content untill it "goes viral".

The exciting thing about this space is that much of it is undefined. It is all about the protocols and the main features at the moment. The 2nd generation tools will be born out of what we discuss now and think about now.

How do you make sure a user is not trapped in his special interest bubble and still gets to see content that has everyone excited? How will we make use of the underlying data, on both posts and users to suggest and aggregate content.

I think there will be more than one solution eventually, different flavours of aggregators running on the same underlying data.

So much possibility. And we control it. If you don't like the way your lemmy instance or kbin aggregates, choose another site or build your own. The data is there.