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
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
People like big numbers. Karma systems exist because they encourage posting and engagement. Stifling growth because Karma is toxic is bad for everyone in the long run. What matters is growth.
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).
The problem isn't the points, it's the people. Everything starts to suck beyond some critical mass.
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”.
I do like that. Perhaps an exponential factor where if you downvote 10 comments you lose 1 karma, downvote 20 you lose 10 karma, etc.
If there has to be something then probably karma that is strictly for the past month of activities.
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.)
Karma should have a half-life, so it's not a forever thing. Have each karma point lose half of its value every three days. Makes it more transitory.
How about just ignoring the whole concept? I.e., voting in individual threads to rank comments, and that's it.
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.
Honestly, I find the entire system annoying and counter to fostering real discussions.
If you go to a party, it's not like people in the room have tags over their heads which say "trustworthy," "troll," "crazy," or whatever else. You have to make up your own mind based on your interactions and (hopefully) use of critical thinking to decide if someone you are talking with is worth your time.
If I don't want to take the time to read anything which might offend me, put me off, make me uncomfortable, challenge me, or just in some way be contrary to my world view then frankly, online forums would not be the spaces in which I would be reading things.
I believe that everyone has a point of view that can have value in some way, if only to illustrate that "negative" or "contrary to me" view and people exist around me. They have voices to contribute. Deciding if their contributions are valuable enough to award them a positive or negative "Reputation" is not an abstract thing. A true reputation takes time to build in the real world. It is earned for better or for worse, by actions people take over time not by some arbitrary number farmed by a bot posting cat memes 24/7 or whatever, or posting viewpoints sure to garner upvotes because like minded people are the only ones replying.