NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin

frasassi@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 14 points –

Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:

  • Upvotes & Downvotes function akin to Reddit
  • Boosts count as two Upvotes (link)
  • Favorites are added to https://kbin.social/fav if you Upvote (link)
  • Reputation Points have been updated

In addition to that, Ernest stated that "there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It's just info in the profile" (link)

23

You are viewing a single comment

I almost wish reputation and things of that nature weren’t publicly visible. A huge part of Reddit that I hated, the circlejerk-y opinions and same tired lame jokes being told over and over again, were caused in large part by people seeking karma (and that’s not even addressing the actual posts, just the stuff in the comments). I would hate to see that eventually start to come back.

There’s obviously some downside to that and it probably warrants a more nuanced solution if anything.

Reddit turned into an echo chamber because of karma, people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma. The downvote feature itself being misused there too.

Reputation should be hidden or removed imo, keep the up/downs/boosts for sorting.

keep the up/downs/boosts for sorting.

This wouldn't solve the problem of downvotes being misused as an indicator of disagreement. I think it's best if it stays entirely incidental.

people didn't want to express a different opinion than what the 'masses' have already decided on, because they would be downvoted and lose karma

Critical difference. Reddit had groupthink literally enforced by the software. If you had negative karma in a subreddit and you tried to post, it would say "You are doing that too much, please wait 8 minutes to post again", even if your last post was 2 weeks ago.

You have to try hard to get negative karma in a sub, or just never use it. Frankly, if a person frequents a sub and consistent say things majority of people dislike, is that person really right for that sub?

I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.

If it does have to return, I'd like it to wipe regularly. Every 3 months or 6 months everyone goes back to zero. Give EVERYONE the same "badge" that just says "so and so was here in year X" or whatever and leave it at that.

Or go back to what forums did and only count post count and word count and turn those into EXP.

Personally a fan of a system that only count the last 30 days. It's not permanent but still let me tell at a glance if someone is likely to be a troll.

I suggested a resetting score elsewhere in here, but I really like this system. Kinda reminds me of Steam's "recent reviews" score. Would let people have a general gist of your recent behaviour. This would allow people to get better or worse and have their score reflect that, instead of one really positive/negative post in their history skewing their score for eternity.