No Stupid Questions

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”.

The worst part about using reddit when I first signed up was having to deal with celebrity redditors with bajillions of karma sucking all the air out of any thread they visited. Thankfully, it seems like over time people calmed down a bit with that, or maybe I just started browing non-defaults with more tight-knit communities, but you still have dumb novelty accounts that kind of ruin the experience (if you've ever been got by /u/shittymorph, you know what I'm talking about).

I don't think there needs to be another system, just a lower emphasis on said system. Like others have said, just post karma.

Someone pointed out that if you make your own instance, you can probably just manipulate your reputation anyway, so it won't be in any way a judge of a person. Even then it was really only useful in extremes, aka if the person had a massively negative rep they were probably a troll, and a near-0 was a new account. Anything other than that was more a metric of time than anything else.

Sure, even post karma is an abusable system, but if you have nothing then you'll be wading through people ignoring others or using circular reasoning to make bad faith arguments. The system is good for at least dealing with extremes.

I think a reputation system is important, though reddit's current karma implementation is bad, there needs to be a method of identifying bad actors and forum shifters.

One refinement over karma could be that the score is kept only by community and should reflect that users contribution to the community.

Simple upvotes and downvotes also don't allow for nuance, replace them with a Buzzfeed like tag system (yes I know we all hate the site for its content but its tag system if used properly could be pretty powerful.

So instead of 'up' and 'down', you have a clickable emoji-menu like list of tags like 'interesting', 'boring', 'funny', 'WTF!?', 'Quality', 'Trash', 'Educational', 'CAT', etc...

So the reputation score for the community isn't just a flat number, rather it will tell you the kind of content a person posts over time, and doesn't carry just flat positive or negative connotation.

I mean the king of Catposting may have massive reputation in meme subs with high ranks in tags for 'Funny', 'Cute', and 'CAT' though that might not be the case if they participate in say a chemistry QnA community.

As these scores are created over time based on each users contributions (post AND comment reputation is the same thing) to the sub as scored by other people's tag selections for that users posts. The more it aligns with the community, the greater their contribution score.

Does this mean that toxic communities can form that exclude people based on reputation tags that the toxic community detests?

Unfortunately yes, that is one of the flaws of the system.

THOUGH

The fact it is contained by community means that a high rep person in an anti-trans community will not have any carryover reputation when joining a community they wish to brigade or degrade the quality of content, and their tag history will make it easy to determine their genuine engagement.

The problem isn't the points, it's the people. Everything starts to suck beyond some critical mass.

In my opinion the best alternative is a -1 : +1 scale. Members who contribute little are near 0, members who contribute a lot in a positive way get towards +1, if users contribute a lot in a negative way, their score goes to -1.

There are lots of different particular ways to implement this that isn't up vs. downvote count. Communities created, moderation activity, post count, engagement per post, positive reporting rate, false reporting rate, number of reports against the user, number of communites banned from, etc.

Honestly it's pretty good to have the transparency of who is up voting, and down voting. Makes it easier to figure out who's farming or not. It's pretty good against the trolls too imo.

I think it is fine now. I don't really want karma totals or a wave of different colored reactions. Upvotes or downvote. I can't even do downvote and haven't missed it.

A web of scores works, but it’s not easy to implement at scale. It means that you’d assign a quality score to people, and in turn would get scores through that person for people you don’t know. If you value somebody highly, you value the people they value.

I still firmly believe one of the worst things to happen to the internet, besides pop-up ads, is up and down votes. Nothing exposes a misanthrope quicker than forcing them to comment instead of passively downvoting everything they see. Which makes it easier to remove them from the party.

Why not keep the scores hidden and just use them to order stuff?

Any shortcut method of mimicking reputation can be and thus will be abused, so they're all toxic.

The only sure way to do it is the good old-fashioned way - by name recognition - actual, earned "reputation."

The way it used to work on all forums and still does on some smaller ones is that people just read posts and write their own posts and over time they come to recognize each other's names and associate them with some impression of each individual's value as a poster.

And yes - that's not very effective in gigantic forums, and it's not accessible to newcomers. You need a relatively small group of posters and new people have to pay attention in order to figure out who are the better or worse posters. That's just the way it is, and is one of the problems with gigantic forums.