A minor suggestion regarding voting and karma
I'm grateful for being invited and I'm happy to see the community enjoy a smooth ride so far.
I really hope the platform does not follow in the footsteps of Reddit's karma mechanism. I find that this cumulative store of points attached to each user to encourages them to seek more points, regardless if they steal content or repost their own old material for another karma-harvesting run. Instead, if users can be appreciated by the actual number of posts they've submitted much like the bulletin boards of old, it would be more fair in my opinion. It'd be a measure of the effort and contribution made by a user, not only what others think of them.
For example, my profile would say "Eyehigh posted 20,000 posts" instead of "Eyehigh seemed to impress 20,000 people enough for them to leave an upvote, so here's the 20,000 upvotes."
What do you think?
I think even showing a number of times they've made a post would be detrimental. Maybe build it into the trust system somehow, but keep it hidden from users.
I think the best system is to have karma but just not make it public. It's not good enough for people to just post things for the sake of posting and get rewarded simply for the post. That encourages low quality, low effort posts in high volumes and reposts of those posts rather than a smaller subset or higher quality posts. Especially in the early stages of the site, you don't want it to just be flooded with shitposts. Keep karma and reward people for high quality content that users like, punish them for low quality content, and do nothing for simply posting. I know there are no downvotes on the site but I feel like that might also hurt in the long run.
I definitely don't think karma or posts should be public, though.
Agreed. As a counterpoint to the OP, showing the number of posts made by a user instead of their karma count could lead to alternative issues with content quality. I'd prefer not to have an arms race for internet points altogether.
That would be better!
I can't remember where, but I feel like we may have already discussed this and decided against a karma system altogether.
That would have been my first preference, but I thought that many would disagree.
I decided to compromise in my suggestion so that metrics are more reflective of the OP than merely someone else's mild agreement embodied in an upvote. If you want to show support or disagreement for a contribution, you can always type a comment, no matter how short.
I agree that I am glad that ~ does not use reddit's karma system and think that post made is an alright metric, however it could lead to lots of low quality short posts for a different sort of meaningless Internet points.
I think it might be better if no number is actually visible. Instead, possibly a number acessible to the server, not any user, which should help to discourage low effirt/quality posts. I am not sure what should be used for this, @Deimos has already written about a reputation system so this might be what is needed?
You could make people's numbers visible only to themselves, becomes more of a statistic than something to show off.
FWIW, this is what hacker news switched to 6-7 years ago and it seems to have worked out well for them. You may be interested in the discussion over the change in this thread where the hn founder solicits feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
Hacker News is good except for the fact that you get points just for posting. You shouldn't get points for just a post but you should definitely get points for votes. My concern there is people creating all kinds of alt accounts once the site is at full capacity just to get their stuff to show up higher.
People could still easily show it off through screenshots and the like. Its not quite as easy, but I do not believe it would be a real detriment.
In my experience those halcyon days of old internet forums had their fair share of spammers looking to +1 their post count, an analogue to today's karma farming.
That said it was nothing an old swing of the ban hammer couldn't solve if it got out of control. I'd definitely enjoy seeing metrics around how much I've added to the site.
Contributions will be reflected in the trust system I believe.
I remember how a lot of old forums had badges or titles next to the username based on their contributions. I'm guessing the trust system will probably look something like that.
From what I've seen in another conversation and this one it seems everyone who's talked is quite happy to not have any points so as to not encourage meaningless shitposting/karma whoreing for the sake of just having more of a number than other people.
It might be nice to be able to see if an @account is new (which we can already do) or has little activity, just so we can see if the account is being used. Maybe mark an account's profile as inactive if it has made, say, fewer than 20 votes/topics/comments in the last month. I would like to avoid being able to differentiate accounts based on, say, 100 comments vs 1000 comments vs 10000 comments since I'd rather not have ~ers separated into privileged/non-privileged groups (even if the only privilege is being able to say you've wasted a lot of time on an internet forum.) Similarly, I would support eventually restricting the account age display so that people who joined in the alpha aren't differentiated from people who joined last year (you'd still be able to find an account's first post, but I still think there'd be a benefit to making this information more annoying to discover.)
I think something along the lines of StackOverflow's "Impact" metric would be a good replacement. Some kind of measure of how much (both positive and negative) interactions the account has caused. This can be then used to measure the notability of an account, without causing the karma problems. However, care must be taken to not incentivize controversial and clickbait behavior instead. I would also like the number to, like stackoverflow impact, not to be shown absolutely, rather as approximate value: "~120k"
For example, something that might work for this metric is e.g. views counting +0.1, votes +10 and comments +1.
A second idea I like is users being awarded medals for particularly noteworthy posts, comments, etc.
Honestly, I'd prefer to see absolutely no public "ranking", "rating", or whatever of users, at all. Let everyone's contribution to the conversation at hand, and their overall comment history, speak for themselves. Why do we need to compete for some form of artificial achievements? I get that there's going to be some sort of reputation calculation driving some of the behind the scenes stuff, and think that's a nice idea, but keep it behind the scenes.