This might be an unpopular opinion, but karma/reputation points. It only encourages hivemind and echo chambers. I'm ok with thread-specific points so that content can be ranked, but that's it.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
97 points (100.0% liked)
Moving to: m/AskMbin!
235 readers
6 users here now
### We are moving! **Join us in our new journey as we take a new direction towards the future for this community at mbin, find our new community here and read this post to know more about why we are moving. Thank you and we hope to see you there!**
founded 2 years ago
I agree with this. Fake internet points ruin the internet.
But how will I feed my endless addiction to numbers?
With hobbies involve lots of data. Anything with an excuse to make a spreadsheet or Grafana dashboard. My latest one is home weather monitoring.
Or if you just want to see a number get bigger, Cookie Clicker is a surprisingly deep distraction.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Agreed. This place shouldn't be a popularity contest.
@arth or a race to the top with the wittiest one liner. Or a serious thread just consisting of one liners. I've loved kbin for how verbose people can be on here, really getting into the spirit of discussing and debating. Proper conversations, not just pun after pun
load more comments
(1 replies)
Yep this ^
The comment/article up/downvote functions combined with personal filters/ban/blacklist tools is all that's needed. Some kind of strange "karma" or global reputation over time is the detrimental to the site and discussions and encourages bandwagoning users.
There are some basic use-cases, imho. Quite a few subs required a minimum level of karma, age, and perhaps activity to reduce spammers.
I see no reason to track karma above 1000 or so, though. Even the most choosy subs never asked for that much karma, so I assume that should be fine.
No karma tracking above 1000 karma. Just display karma as "1000+" and that's it.
The karma system was not even effective against spammers, while it did block out genuine new accounts and people with unpopular opinions. Bots would just repost popular posts and comments to farm karma and bypass the restrictions.
It would have been if it was used right.
Anyone with half a brain could spot a karma farming account. When I first became a mod of a very large sub there I looked at the recent ban log and spotted some accounts banned a couple months back for karma farming. They were being used for things like promoting drug sites, crypto, etc.
The algorithm used karma and history to help filter/restrict accounts. The problem was that not everyone was committed to doing that. Most of the meme subs had mods who just didn't give a shit and when you sent them a modmail with: 'Hey these are clearly bot accounts reposting word for word popular posts including the links (which is a really good indication it's a script', they just wouldn't do anything or just very aggressively respond that they wouldn't do anything. Henceforth their subs became ground zero for botters and scammers who wanted to build history on an account.
Reddit had an automated process, as far as I could tell, for banning/restricting these kinds of account. If enough large subs banned them in a period of time, it would seem like their accounts would be suspended almost immediately. So if they happened to post in the wrong group of subs when I spotted them, I'd modmail all those subs and they'd all ban them and the account would disappear, but if they hit the right subs where the mods didn't care, then they wouldn't, and it would take a lot more work to get them dealt with.
Karma is a good way to track participation, but if people ignore/abuse the system it falls apart.
The fact that reddit didn't have a process in place to track accounts posting word for word (including link) reposts and immediately ban them was really weak. Also the fact that the algorithm checked karma and history but the admin gave their blessing to subs like freekarma4u because some subs had karma requirements was a bit of a joke.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
agree totally, the constant reposting to karma farm was one of the biggest annoyances
I agree. People can never fully seem to grasp that upvote and downvote do not mean agree and disagree, which discourages real conversation and ferments a hivemind.
People that want to put the effort in to have real discussions also don’t tend to care about internet points. But people that care about internet points are more inclined to only post low effort content and continual reposts.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
I liked the idea is having awards or little extras that you can award to posts you're keen on, but what I didn't like was that Reddit profited from it
Something like that here might actually be useful as the money could act as donations for the devs to pay for their time / server fees. At least in that way people are getting something small but contributing.
I personally liked the gold-silver awards, but felt like adding million award options really cluttered the UI. But I agree it's a great way to get some money for server hosting.
This is the thing;
I don't mind to pay for services, I don't mind to pay for extra's as long as the money goes to the people doing the work and the people doing the work increase or maintain the user experience of said service.
The whole "you just want free stuff" people were shouting on Reddit is a bunch of balony.
- Hosting costs money
- Infrastructure costs money
- Developing costs money
- Maintenance costs money
All the above also costs time.
So of course it is okay for people to donate or have some monetization possibilities to keep the lights on and getting paid for the work they do so they can make a full time living from it or use it as a part time gig.
But there is still a difference size rift between the above and trying to monetize every single thing from your platform/user base just because of greed.
Well, there is this:
https://kbin.social/awards
Doesn't seem to be an active feature right now though.
Those are more like Reddit trophies, Reddit awards are the little stickers next to posts and comments (like "Reddit Gold" and "Wholesome") that users pay to add to comments. It would be interesting to see how awards and payments work with federation.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I can see that working well as long as awards don't affect the placement of comments and posts. Have it just show a icon next to the comment or post like a reaction.
If magazines can have custom award icons that'd add some charm to the feature.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I hope kbin never implements fuzzy votes or shadowbanning.
If you have a system of upvotes and downvotes, don’t falsify the numbers. If you ban users, don’t pretend they aren’t banned.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I never liked the auto-banning feature Reddit had where if you join X subreddit you get a ban from Y subreddit. Dogshit auto moderation like that needs to stay on Reddit tbh
That wasn't a feature of reddit. That was the mods of that sub running a bot that checked for you posting there. They had issues with people from that sub and just decided that if people participated there, then they weren't welcome in their sub.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Ad revenue. I'd rather give money directly to my instance owner.
Awards. I just think they're unnecessary for an internet forum.
i wouldn't totally mind this since it could go directly to funding the server/Ernest without ads, and people can show 'extra love' for posts they like, but i can understand why it would be disliked.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Shadowbanning. Either outright ban someone and let the community know why, or don't. That's it! Transparency and honesty are the way to go. Arguably this is more of a moderator/admin morality issue than anything else, but still.
Unfortunately shadowbanning is a very useful feature against spambots, so it will probably be implemented in the fediverse as well.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Any ban should be transparent to the users.
Vulcan was a victim of the Snoo Shadowbans, apparently due to usage of VPN services.
load more comments
(1 replies)
All the new crap that theyve added in the last 3-5 years. Chat, spamming me with "recommended" reddits, constantly asking for my interests, slow as hell site, avatars, NFTs,..
Relay and old.reddit really kept me sheltered. I knew chat was a thing but I managed to avoid the rest. That all sounds awful.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Karma scores - on an account level at least. Up/down votes on a post or comment are fine and make sense, pushing bad replies down and the best, most thoughtful stuff to the top.
But a system where accounts can build up a karma/reputation score just leads to karma whoring comments just intended to gain upvotes and adding little to the conversation. Or worse, repost bots just reposting whatever was popular last week to gain karma. Reddit's been plagued with it for years and it just makes the whole place seem spammy and low quality.
Exactly. Comments and posts/threads should have up and down votes, but those should not accumulate on an account like Karma does.
It gets people used to the idea that the more points a person has, clearly the better quality their account must be, when in reality Karma could be easily accumulated by exploiting lurkers with cute animal photos or generic/milquetoast opinion pieces literally nobody could disagree with.
Edit: milquetoast not milktoast
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
NFT avatars 🫠
Anything they force upon you in new Reddit. Compare old to new, and you see that the same amount of page nets you a third of the content. So much bloat. Profile pictures are nice, tags and flairs are nice, but any of the crap they introduced to make things more like Facebook and Twitter can go right in the bin.
An automod which deletes comments with words that are not allowed with zero human review.
I ran into issues using words like "kill" for example, which I understand isn‘t good in the context of calling for violence and should then be modded, but I only used it in a way that should be accepted. Like reacting to a headline which is about people being killed by a government, I should be able to use the word kill in a sentence that criticises that.
Probably why this stupid word unalive now exists is how common it seems to be to censor the word kill entirely, like.. sure, you don‘t want people to incite violence or talk about hurting themselves, that’s reasonable—but it ain‘t going to happen by making a word a taboo!
People just make up new words to say the same thing or use framings like "an action which ends a life" etc so hopefully if this stays small we can have actual human decisions which include context when it comes to censoring.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Chat feature, reddit snoo avatar crap, overdoing it with hundreds of different pointless awards, and inline gifs. (yes I know you can put in images but so far everyone is using them sparingly, and even then i think kbin's UI can handle them better than reddit did).
Live threads...
Karma was supposed to be- does the post fit the sub, if so upvote, if not downvote; but people use it as a meter to say they agree or disagree, like or don't like. It seemed to inspire hatred and anger. There's so much negativity towards others on Reddit. I'm not sure how to stop the antipathy but personally I don't want to see that here.
Also, cross posting from apps like tictok is bothersome. If I want to see this type of thing, I'll go there and watch.
I am glad we have normal text formatting here.
Return, means, new line!!!
Also, it's nice to be away from so many useless unhelpful bots. If I wanted to post a Wikipedia synapses, I would have.
What I always hated:
You find a good topic, and basically ALL comments talk about something completly different.. and still get upvoted.
Maybe a thumps up for staying on topic?
load more comments
(2 replies)
All those god damn awards & animations that came with the redesign. It's nothing but bloat & distracting.
profile pictures. it can lead to bias and even be used as a vehicle for propaganda.
there should at least be an option to hide them.
Propaganda??? I personally like pfps/avatars and think they're an important part of any traditional forum. Identity is important in communities and I think they help facilitate that. I just wish that I could adjust the size of the on Kbin because they're way too small for me. 🥲 But you should always have the option to hide them as well.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Don't know if you mean that profile pictures hiding should be a magazine specific setting, but you personally can hide profile pictures (and magazine logos) in your side bar settings.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›