No Stupid Questions

Subs should be able to force sort by controversial for comments and/or posts.

Any damn fool can come up with comments that are universally approved of, or universally hated. They aren't interesting.

The phrase 'trivially true' applies - "This crime was a bad thing, and the people responsible shouldn't have done it! I am very angry at them!" may be emotionally satisfying to say or to cheer on, but it doesn't add a damn thing to the conversation, any more than "hur hur suck it libruls" does.

There isn't a term for the inverse of ragebait, but there needs to be. All the le reddit moments - the tedious meme-chains, forced in-jokes, etc.

For subs where you want interesting discussion, you want to sort both to the bottom. It's the posts that divide opinions that are worth talking about, almost by definition. If a post has a thousand votes but the total is close to zero, well hey, that's probably worth seeing and engaging wth.

Let people vote with their heart, use upvotes/downvotes however the fuck they want to instead of constantly nagging and whining about it - and then use that to detect and de-prioritise mediocrity.

It wouldn't be appropriate for all subs, but for some places, I think it'd be a huge improvement.

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”.

Something that is based on user activity and active users after a specific time. i.e the more users it has, the more highlighted it gets. (And before someone says about bots, etcetc that can be easily circumvented with filters and the like.)

Other methods of what?

What if we had a community standing metric that flips only between "good" and "bad."

You get "bad standing" if the majority of your contributions in the last 6 months have a majority of downvotes than upvotes, but it resets after 6 months.

Everyone defaults to "good standing".

This serves the purpose of a metric to filter out trolls or bad-faith actors, whilst making "karma farming" pointless.

Not really sure what you think is wrong with karma? most of reddit's problem IMO come down to bad moderation.

But for comment scoring, there are really just 3 methods I've seen:

• Generic Up/Downvote - Reddit
• Categorized Up/Downvote - Slashdot - This worked on a technical forum to keep technical knowledge near the top, while still allowing stupid/funny comments further down the page, plus it made ignoring stupid/funny threads easy
• Personalized Up/Downvote - Facebook/Twitter/etc - basically build a profile of users you agree/interact with, and then weight their interactions accordingly to predict what content you'll like/hate.
  • I believe Ticktok take this to the next level, because 90% of users don't up/downvote, ticktok logs the passive act of continuing to watch content as a partial upvote making their algorithms train on the average users likes/dislikes faster.

You could probably combine Personalized & Categorized, but I've AFAIK not seen it done.

I think the problems with moderation are harder to solve, because you have both bad-faith moderators & good-faith but easily played moderators as problems, and you also want different dynamics as forums grow.

I think lemmy could really experiment with good moderation & meta-moderation and if the developers are interested anyway, be a far better forum as a result.

• Peer review of moderator decisions is something Slashdot did that went quite well. Once you'd been an active user with good "karma" for a while you would occasionally be asked to review other users votes, I think a similar thing could be done for moderation decisions
• Elected mods. For subs above a certain size, having moderation essentially boil down to whatever the guy who created the sub decides, is bad. I don't know exactly how it would work to prevent abuse, but as subs grow, at some point it would be good if the community chose the mods.
  • even short of full fledged democracy community approval of mod appointments would certainly reduce the amount of mod drama where it 1 bad head mod, will purge the other mods and replace them all with sock puppets.
• Users-led replacement of bad mods, similar to electing mods, it would be good for users to "recall" a bad mod.
• Transparency over mod actions, I understand that with the number of Nazis & other assorted trolls online reddit chose to let mods, moderate anonymously, but it really means you have no idea who is doing a good/bad job in many subreddits, some level of transparency for all but the worst content is key.
• Moving subs, as lemmy instances have some control over the content of the subs that reside on them, it would make sense for there to be some method for the users + mods of a sub to decide to move it to another instances. This not only prevents admin abuse, but also encourages competition between instances for technical administration & content administration.
• Splitting communities , sometimes subs grow "too big" and have different subcommunities that end up fighting for control of a sub, it would be good if there were a way of these communities splitting into 2 rather than fighting over the original name. not sure how it would work, but thinking about how r/trees & r/cannabis split or something similar. Maybe /r/canabis could become an combo of /r/canabisnews & /r/canabismemes, where users can just ubsub from the 1/2 of the content they don't want.
• Letting users weight subs/filter subs how much of subs they see, sometimes I've unsubbed from a high-content sub, just because while i liked the content it was overpowering the rest of my feed, it would be nice to have users configure how much of a sub they see (especially if combined with Categorized Up/Downvote), rather than complaining about "bad moderation" I can just personally choose to see less of what I don't want.

Anyway thank you for reading/not-reading my ted talk, but I suspect this will come up again so now I can copy/pasta it.

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

Call it "updoots" instead.

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).

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.