Hey! Thanks to the whole Reddit mess, I’ve discovered the fediverse and its increidible wonders and I’m lovin’ it :D
I’ve seen another post about karma, and after reading the comments, I can see there is a strong opinion against it (which I do share). I’d love to hear your opinions, what other method/s would you guys implement? If any ofc
I’m not from reddit, what is a reputation and what practical effect does it have? Is it just upvotes minus downvotes?
I found a reputation in my profile of “1” but I don’t have a clue where that came from. I’m not sure why we need to have scores associated with our accounts, that in itself seems toxic to me to care about (clout chasing).
Upvoting comments in threads makes sense, I’m just not seeing any actual practical connection with the thing called “reputation” on my profile. What does it do in a best case?
On reddit, this was “karma,” and it was your total upvotes minus downvotes, yeah. Socially, I know some people used it to judge whether the person they were fighting with had a strong history of acting like a troll (karma way in the negatives from all the previous downvotes).
Subreddits could also set minimum karma limits so anyone with less than X amount of karma (usually bot accounts) couldn’t post there. Until the bot reposted something popular, and then they had all the karma they could want, so it wasn’t really very useful imo.
On Kbin, it got renamed to “reputation,” but it currently doesn’t really do anything. Right now, there’s also an issue with the way it’s calculated: downvotes make your reputation go down, but upvotes do nothing. It’s boosts that make the recipient’s reputation go up/make the thing boosted more important to the algorithm.
The boost button is basically the retweet button, but since kbin is primarily used as a forum more than a blogging service, people are much more likely to downvote than they are to reblog anything and it can cause your reputation to be lower than it should be. The dev here has already acknowledged it as a problem.
Really, I wish the reputation counter on profiles would be removed in the future. It’s only visible on kbin in the first place, and the main thing it accomplishes is encouraging people to
karmareputation farm via low-effort reposts and comments so they can watch the funny number go up. There’s no real reason to keep it.I appreciated that on Mastodon I had the ability to hide stats from my UI view, no harm making it optional I suppose.