No Stupid Questions

Initially I was bummed out about not having internet points here like on reddit. However after considering the fluidity this offers... like being whoever you want to be anywhere you want... being able to migrate from one server to another... etc ithink I'd rather we keep it this way to avoid complications

I'd just like.. users have a comment count

and a post count

simply.

some people like to make posts

some like to just comment (this is mostly me)

i can also live without it but.. if there absolutely have to be something..

i dont like "karma" on reddit

yah, karma was garbage, I think we are better off without it.

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).

Personally i like to call em WIP. Worthless internet points. Just to be clear i cherish my WIP. I would never disrespect my WIP. That's just my name for it.

I was thinking maybe some kind of ranking system like Street Fighter 6?

I know everyone seems to be hating karma but I do like that dopamine release. Ofx it will get abused... but what if there are just tiers, rather than seeing a number go up.

And at the highest tier, it doesn't matter anymore. That was you can see who is most active and it kind of gives just a bit of prestige. Furthermore, you won't see a number going up forever, so after awhile it's not like you want to keep gaming the system to see the number go up. But at the same time you can feel some some of progression.

Anyways, it's just a random thought I had as I am grinding on SF6 today haha. I could easily do without karma but it's just a thought.

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.

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.

Personally, I enjoy how 4chan does it. Posts are anonymous and seen in chronological order. There are no upvotes/downvotes and no karma or e-peen linked to accounts. Also, everything is temporary and gets deleted off the site completely eventually.

The pros are that you have to judge posts based on its content and nothing else, and can't look through someone's post history and stalk them across the site.

The cons are that you have to shift through tonnes of shitposts just to find decent content which will eventually get deleted. You can't find the top posts of all time, because they're gone. The system also makes it a great place for trolls. 4chan has so many of them that threads entirely made up of trolls trolling trolls is a thing.

If you're looking for a site that ranks the best content then a voting system is needed. If you're looking for discussion then a voting system and permanent accounts only get in the way.

I think if we feel the need to do anything like it, chasing the number alone will be what makes people insufferable. Maybe track it invisibly on the instance where the account is hosted and display only a colour. Red for negative points, yellow up to maybe 50ish, and anything above is green. Enough to pick out the trolls while providing no reward for karma chasers. I don't think anything beyond that is useful.

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”.