Why doesn't Tildes display a user's social score or karma on their profile page?
I've noticed that tildes is somewhat different than other social networks in that it doesn't display a user's karma, neither on profile page or on the handle. On other networks, you'll always see something like pyeri [100] at almost every place where pyeri posts.
Is there any thought process behind this design decision? Do you think judging users by their social score might lead to "class conflicts" of sorts which might erupt in flame wars or something? Or do you think high karma will reach their heads and make them more narcissistic while a lower score will make them prone to imposter syndrome!
But on the flip side, this karma score acts as a kind of street cred indicator. What the community thinks about a particular user is public and known to the community in the natural and organic course of content creation which is quite desirable.
The strongest reasons for why the site was designed without displayed account-score is to discourage people gamifying getting score.
Rather, the idea is that people contribute when they feel they have something to contribute. Each contribution also stands more on its own legs. The idea is placing content first as much as possible,
When we have numbers or other incentives, behavior is often optimized very strongly toward those goals even though that's expressly not the goal. Think different measures in a business that are judged by. However much the repeated mantra is that it's only part of what we aim to do, when you're measured on a specific number, activity is geared toward maximizing that number.
Another thing I noticed about Tildes (as someone who joined literally just a few hours ago) is that fact that the reply box to a post is right at the bottom, which I think is wonderful because it forces the reader to skim/read through the comments before crafting a response instead of just smashing keys in rage or <insert emotion>.
Great work by u/Deimos
Just an FYI - you can tag people here with @ instead of u/
That's good to know, thanks for the info.
Ok actually I’m wrong. You can do either, though it seems like @ is more common anecdotally. I should RTFM huh?
Well before I didn't know a single way to do it and now I know three so thanks again!
Yep, this is actually explained further in their docs, which I've found to be a nice read in itself by the way.
Heh, I actually don't like that but didn't think of it that way.
I don't want to continue comparing this site to reddit, since it's designed to be different. However (to do it anyway), I noticed on reddit that actual insightful discussion ended up buried underneath whoever managed to get a clever one-liner on the post first, precisely because of the karma situation. Though, to be honest, something similar could happen here if you sorted by votes.
However, the relevant sort is an excellent idea. I've looked at the source code for how it works, and I've got to give Deimos and 'Exemplary' label for essentially tackling exactly what I mentioned above with it. Jokes have their 'vote power' halved and exemplary comments get a positive multiplier. A community sourced nuance to votes, beautiful.
Yeah, the "Joke" tag is specifically there to bump witty one liners out of the top spot in favor of deeper discussion of the topic. It sounds like you've already read up on the tags, but you should have access to them a week after signup.
The great part about that system is that you can still make jokes, they just get pushed down on the sorting priority. It's not actively punishing you for it by hiding or dinging your score (the way a noise tag does).
This is basically an operationalized form of normal social courtesy. If people are having a serious conversation you generally ought to have the social grace to read the room and avoid butting in with a one-liner when they're deep into it. People who do that are generally viewed as being oafish and obnoxious. You wait for a lull in the conversation (comic timing isn't really a factor since it's threaded, asynchronous communication) to make your pithy remark. Sorting jokes to the bottom is functionally inserting them at the lull.
This is such an interesting perspective on the joke tag.
I'd always felt a bit guilty about using it in the past, feeling like I was being a buzzkill or looking down on someone for sharing something funny, but you're totally right: it's slotting jokes into an appropriate place while prioritizing the flow of more "genuine" or on-topic responses, exactly the way you might in a conversation IRL.
I agree, I took one look at kbin comments and was like ah….yes, I think I’ll stick to Tildes.
Didn’t know about the joke tag; what awesome design!
I thoroughly enjoyed switching between top, new and most controversial comments in big threads to read reactions from multiple sides.
Theres a lot of eye opening discussions if you look for the places where people actually engage instead of echoing or voting on zingers.
Although , some of the zingers are pretty hilarious.
I've also definitely took my time scrolling replies pretty far down to see whether another human had come up with the same lame joke I did. Sometimes I'd just upvote and move on, but for some I will have replied "had to scroll way too far down before I found this". It is true and succinct, despite being a nonpersonal canned response, that adds little to the discourse, other than showing some appriciation toward the other commentor.
Others have mentioned tags, which are crucial, but I want to add that I really like the default comment sorting algorithm ("relevance"). I've noticed new comments with one or two or even zero votes sometimes sit above the top voted comments for a little while, it helps with the burying problem.
My theory is that tons of people see the post title and think "Oh man I need to go make the single most obvious joke. " Then they see someone made it already, and they throw in an upvote because it's kind of like a vote for yourself. Then they move on to the next thread. So the dumbest most generic jokes rise to the top, since those have the most people thinking "huh that's what I was going to say."
In the world of production the adage is, "You get what you measure."
Anecdotally (based on my experiences), I will say I have seen a notable difference in culture between places where the generally available/advertised metrics are defects versus places where the generally available/advertised metrics are on-time completions.
And this is something I really like.
It should not matter how often someone got how many upvotes. That doesn't affect whether each individual post or comment is meaningful or not, and hence it makes no sense to allow this as a bragging right. Plus, really... if it's focused about what we're saying, then that ought to speak for itself. And we can see what someone said. That's all that matters.
I agree with this. The only person my vote score matter to is me, and that's awesome. I do like to see how many people enjoyed my comment, mostly because I like to know that it resonated with somebody, but I don't need to know how many times total that's happened, or how many times that's happened to someone else. It's a personal badge, not one to flash at others.
Exactly my thoughts. I've been registered on this site for about as long as you have (June 2018), but I've always been extremely cautious to comment as I've seen what extraneous "noise" can do to an online community.
Its not important, and thinking it is is kind of a core issue with a lot of social media. Followers, karma, whatever the score keeping is, it creates a game.
Tracking some kind of "score" invariably leads users to optimizing for increasing said score, which leads to posts & comments catering to the lowest common denominator. It's arguably why on reddit, subreddits get worse and worse over time as they grow in size.
Exactly this! Tildes intentionally avoids gamification of boosting individuals and promotes communal engagement and quality discussion.
I like that there's no score. I think that public scores and downvotes encourage the behavior of an echo chamber, instead of actual discussion with a myriad of viewpoints. Here, you feel free to express an opinion that may be unpopular to the masses, and I think that's a good thing (assuming it isn't illegal, racist, etc which go against the quite reasonable rules of this site).
On Reddit, people dared not to go against the hivemind for fear of getting downvoted into oblivion. And if they did, they would often delete the comment, and the echo chamber was further sealed.
So IMO, not caring about "score" can lead to higher quality discussion overall, which is something that I love about this site.
I don't see a need for a score, but a lot of people that complain about an echo-chamber just want to be able to concern troll or bring strife into a comment chain where they know they will get a negative reaction. Thats one of the biggest reasons i used Boost for reddit is a could filter out all the conservative sub-reddits so i would not have to see their hate. If we are not allowed to filter out what we don't like there will be less engagement as people don't want to chat with users that are not coming for a good faith argument.
I think there's a big difference between personal client-side content filtering (what you did with Boost) and public downvoting/karma tracking, though. Tildes already lets you unsubscribe from topics, although you could argue that the existing communities aren't granular enough to prevent something like reading someone's conservative viewpoints on widespread topics. What Tildes doesn't allow you to do is express your personal dissatisfaction with someone's opinion in a way that affects how everyone else views that comment or user (I'm talking about the comment score and/or the user's karma here).
There is a sizable grey area that is very personally determined when it comes to a comment that you disagree with, between someone who is trying to be a troll / bring strife into a comment chain compared to someone who is indeed making a good faith argument with a viewpoint that you happen to disagree with. Reddit's anonymous, but public downvoting style resulted in anyone who disagreed with someone to downvote them, which affected the poster's karma, which discouraged posters from posting "unpopular" (to Reddit's demographic) opinions to general subreddits (even in good faith). This resulted in most subreddits becoming either their own echo chamber, or part of Reddit's larger echo chamber that represented the Reddit hivemind.
I think that if you wanted to create your own echo chamber filled with only viewpoints that you agree with, without affecting the experience for everyone else, Tildes should perhaps allow something like allowing you to block a user whose viewpoints you disagree with at whatever threshold that you decide you don't want to read their comments anymore. This would shape your experience how you want it, without affecting anyone else.
This right here. So often on Reddit I had to make an edit on comments that got into controversial or negative karma territory because it was something factual or an opinion that was disagreed with. That's not what downvotes were even for but what they were used on. Just the other week, I saw a guy get downvoted like 100 times across a couple comments on a gaming reddit for stating the OP had to be lying given what they had shared. It later turned out the OP was in fact lying.
People abused downvotes. Subs added little "this is for irrelevance, not disagreement" pop-ups (that could only really show on old.reddit and desktop specifically), but it wouldn't deter. I've always agreed that the best way to voice disagreement is to comment that. And that top comments aren't always the most valuable; just generally whoever got their first, sometimes just making a joke. Here, it feels like all comments are good, quality comments for the purpose of discussion and not votes. Heck, compare how big the vote counter is here to kbin.social; you see which one really cares about that kind of thing.
I agree, i dislike the upvote/downvote, but like client filtering.
I believe the absence of a visible karma score is intentional to disincentive people from posting just for the sake of increasing it. And since posts can't be downvoted, a user's karma could only ever increase so its use for street cred is limited anyway.
I like it this way. Everyone can be judged on the quality of their posts rather than simply who has the "highest score".
I don't want internet points to dictate my contributions.
Vote and number is enough.
Contrary to the wider notion here of "scores are bad because gaming scores is not what we want", I'd like to vaguely point in the direction of scores that capture what we want the site to be. No clue how to implement that, and a simple vote count absolutely isn't it. But I can imagine a tildes where a user's profile displays some stats about their contributions to tildes that -if maximized- make tildes better for everyone. Just spitballing, but: How many newbies have you shown the ropes? How many trolls did you "dissuade"? How often have you stopped good users from writing stupid things? How many people have learned from your posts, or otherwise remember them positively a week or more later? I'm sure you can think of more, and maybe you can think of ways in which maximizing what I spitballed makes the site worse.
I'm not saying there's a simple solution here that we should immediately go for. I just want us to think about the potential in this space a bit. Maybe we can come up with something useful. Maybe the reddit induced trauma reaction of "karma farming makes it worse" doesn't mean we should go for the opposite of no metrics.
My initial thought is that showing these kinds of "contributions" may lead to gatekeeping and policing of comments. New users are already intimidated to interact with the community.
I'm happy to just have everyone on an equal playing field with no stats showing, other than on posts/comments.
Yeah, that's a thing that could happen. I'm imagining an implementation where "seniority" isn't much of a factor, i.e. quantity doesn't matter much. To put it in overly reductive terms: Instead of "total number of helpful events", think "helpful events per comment". I'm sure that's insufficient in its own ways.
To expand on your idea, I think it wouldn't even need to be a "score" per se. It could simply be a series of descriptive, text-based "titles" of sorts that indicate whether someone's comments have typically been thoughtful or found useful by others.
Hell, by leveraging tags and other metrics, you could even go a bit deeper and give out titles such as "funny" (frequent joke tags + high vote count) and similar. You could also take into account typical comment length or even the topics/communities they usually comment in to create more interesting, even combined titles.
The key thing is that none of those titles would need to be "better" than others per se - they could just be small indicators of the type of comments that person usually writes. If someone is frequently tagged for bad contributions, such as noise, troll, etc., you simply wouldn't give them any special title, as that would only encourage indiscriminate brigading against that person even if they start writing better comments at some point.
That said, I still think no score at all (as it is now) is way better than just the pure karma approach sites like reddit follow, and any alternatives should be thought of carefully.
Honestly, I don't see the point of such a public "score" of sorts. Aren't the consequences of those actions rewarding enough on their own? If you're helping to build a better community, the benefit of coexisting in an improved community directly applies to you. If you want to show gratitude to someone who helped you or the site in any way, you can send them a direct message saying thanks. I can't think of a reason why someone would want that displayed on their public profile (or even shown only to himself) that isn't related to an ego trip.
Furthermore, the examples you provided—while certainly beneficial to the community—are too abstract to be quantified directly. Who would determine if someone successfully dissuaded a troll or effectively guided a newcomer? I understand that you're only providing situations that came to mind, but the more you delve into making this practical, the closer you'll get to a system that is superficial—such as measuring the number of "exemplary" posts a user has—and could be abused by individuals seeking validation from strangers on the internet.
I'm sorry if my tone come as striking. I'm open to change my view on this one.
I'm not necessarily thinking of such "scores" or whatever form it may take as bragging rights for the author; I am mostly imagining them having useful information content to others. I agree that the social rewards of an action should be sufficient motivation, and adding statistical rewards shouldn't be necessary.
I agree that everything I mentioned is -without refinement- too abstract to be quantified. I know that. I'm putting these here as ideas for things that could exist in this space. And maybe we find things in that space that we as a community would like to realize.
Whatever we display must by necessity shape user behavior in the right direction, because otherwise it shapes it in the wrong direction. That doesn't mean the point is to shape user behavior, it's merely an explanation of where the viable design space lies that doesn't make the site worse. Perhaps my comment is a bit too focused on that part. But that leaves a wide open space for us to explore.
Let me put it like this: When viewing another user's profile, what information would you like to see beyond what the user put there and what they recently posted? And is the answer really "nothing"?
I see what you're saying now, and your last statement certainly give much room for thought. The registered date is already a information that give some context about the user. Given the aim of this site, I think metrics related to relative community engagement would be the best in this situation, but maybe we could do it without showing numbers, that would open space to comparisons and egos.
One thing that comes to my mind would be something akin to a radar chart (https://www.datanovia.com/en/blog/beautiful-radar-chart-in-r-using-fmsb-and-ggplot-packages/) that would display the user's relative engagement to each group. This way, it could be used to discern user from user, and grant a kind of individual identity to each one. Like "oh, thats @vektor from ~sports" or "thats @aisneto from ~books". I don't have the slightest clue if it this would even be pratically doable code-wise though.
Ahhh, now we're getting somewhere. That's another one I like. I don't think many people take issue with other people knowing what communities they interact with, so that's not going to hurt much. I also don't think there's much of a "hierarchy" of groups (or tags for that matter) that would lead to people "gaming" the system. Why would I deliberately go into books to pad my stats? Either I think books are cool, or I stick with sports. Maybe I see that info and am embarrassed that I'm completely neglecting my book hobby and set out to talk about it more, but that also seems like a beneficial effect because it helps me align how I interact with how I intend to interact.
One I could think of along these lines but discarded quickly is a pie chart of the type of contributions: Commenting, posting, tagging, labeling, etc.; but I'm too wary of a potential value judgement of these to seriously consider it.
There's just so much stuff here that we could do, and I think the big engagement-driven platforms have Stockholm-syndromed us into thinking these have to be competetive contests for the sake of optimizing their engagement numbers. Be creative. Free your mind. We can sort out the technically infeasible ones later. The radar chart for example seems quite feasible to me.
Adding to this. On reddit, on a subreddit dedicated to constructive discussion, I would start to add regulars as friends. The reason was that their name got marked and they were easier to find in threads. This worked really well as these people consistently put effort and insight into their responses. This way they weren't drowned out by the noise when the thread reached a wider outside of the subreddit. It's important to note it's not just about quality text, but consistently finding people that you can have a constructive discussion with at all. You are talking to strangers after all.
So I don't think forums necessarily to find these universal or objective metrics, categorizing people or saying anything about them, as this comes with it's cart full of problems. For example reddit karma point is this seemingly neutral or objective metric, but it also doesn't say anything specific about the user. Simply adding tools for the users, like in my case, marking a persons user name with a different color helped me find the discussions I wanted to be a part of. It also humanized them as I was recognizing and having conversations with the same person, even seeing their more grander perspective on things.
I like that. I'll also echo RES's feature of a upvote count - RES will track how many upvotes each user's gotten from you. Sometimes you'll see users you've given 10-20 upvotes to on completely unrelated subreddits, and instantly know that this isn't some random stranger, even if the username doesn't ring a bell immediately.
I like your idea. Make it completely subjective, but give users the option of "personalizing" the profiles of their peers a bit. That way, there's no vying for favors, or gaming any metrics.
I think having any kinds of scores or metrics (including what we would think of as positive ones) tied to a specific user account (and especially displayed publicly) encourages ego-centric/ego-inflating, and competitive game-like behavior, even if subconsciously, both of which I find an anathema to good discussion
I agree. Most people will agree that karma farming was terrible on Reddit but I don't think we can necessarily make the conclusion that metrics are always bad. As you state, a certain kind of metric might encourage users to make positive contributions to the site. I don't know if it would make sense to maybe count how many "Exemplary" or other positive responses your comments have gotten but I'm sure there could exist some kind of positive stats to display. I'm sure any metric can be abused but designed well, it might do more good than harm.
I don't think they thought to implement something like that. Frankly, it doesn't matter. If your words or takes matter, people will remember your name.
This was expressly discussed at length before Deimos released the site with the design and features he wanted and chose.
He's a smart dude.
He’s an ex Reddit dev/admin. A lot of thought has gone into these things. A lot of lessons learned.
You’d be surprised how much thought can go into seemingly insignificant things when your job is to think about them.
I wonder if we ever crossed paths at some point.. regardless, I'm very satisfied with his creation and happy to be here.
I'm stupid enough to waste time checking my posts score, hoping they go viral. So personally, I'd like it to go further, so I can choose to hide the score of the posts. I used a script to hide karma completely in Reddit, and it felt really liberating to no longer having to bother with it.
Seconding this - there was a few month period way back when score visibility was turned off across the site and I thought it was great. I didn’t want scores turned off, but that’s exactly why doing so globally was a good thing for me: there was suddenly no compulsion to “see how my comment was doing”.
The ethos of the site, the fairly slow pace, and the rest mean it’s not something I get too wrapped up in here anyway, but watching that number go up is still an unhealthy little dopamine hit compared to the real engagement of conversation.
Added to Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/issues/780
cc: @Halfdan
Thanks!
Much appreciated!
I do this for comments, but since Tildes was slowly getting quieter until recently, I had been lowering my expectations. I was thinking of 1 vote as "worth writing, someone liked it" and 4 votes as "popular." It seems too easy these days, but I'll adjust.
I do think it's useful feedback. Maybe treating 10+ as maxed out would make sense?
This isn't a direct answer and is more tangentially related, but if anyone hasn't yet read these docs on the philosophy of Tildes I'd suggest having a look:
Because it's an incentive to post what the community wants, not to spur discussion. Reddit is driven by the points incentive, and the goal of Tildes is to value ideas over who can post the most popular/easiest to engage thing.
When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric
on reddit the karma system was never supposed to matter, but it mattered so much to a ton of people. Not having a visible "score" helps avoid some of the issues around it pretty well and the discussions here tend to be more poignant rather than quippy, which I appreciate a lot.
To me the only thing that should matter about the credibility of a given comment or post is the content of that post, not who posted it. Likeability is not equivalent to correctness or discussion value, but that's what the public karma system ends up reinforcing in users
not only does Tildes not show the overall karma, but I've hid all forms of vote count all together -- https://i.imgur.com/i8p3yM0.png
Counts for posts are hidden and votes on comments only return
votedinstead ofvote (1)or whatever it says.I've been hear from almost the start and the lack of karma / scorekeeping is one of my favorite features.
There have been many recent meta threads about Tildes, and I've enjoyed reading the posts from older users because of their perspective on the site's history and culture (I joined in June like many of you). It's been helpful to know "Is this post by someone who's been here for years, or someone who joined last week?". The only way to know that is that is click on their user profile or remember their name from older discussions.
I would like to see the year a user joined displayed next to a user's posts.
If the number of groups grows and they eventually become opt-in, it might be even better to display the year when the user joined that particular group instead of when they joined Tildes.
The age of the account is a fixed metric that cannot be gamed (other than by purchasing or hacking old accounts), so it doesn't have the downsides of measuring karma or engagement. It would enable people to take the age and experience of the poster into account when reading posts, which could be good or bad depending on situation. What do you think?
An old-timer on Tildes (been here since before it was created) made the observation today that the recent bump in activity has not only resulted from a lot of new users joining Tildes, but also from a lot of old users "waking up" from their long sleeps.
There are some users around here who joined Tildes in the first few months, back in 2018, posted for a few weeks or months, and then stopped participating until recently. The age of an account on Tildes doesn't always correlate with someone's experience on Tildes. So, even knowing when someone joined Tildes won't necessarily give you a good indication of how much they've interacted with Tildes.