NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin ( kbin.social )

PositiveNoise , 11 months ago

Honestly, I hope the UI adds a built-in option to hide upvotes and downvotes (seeing the vote totals and having the up and down arrows visible to click on). I know there are pros and cons of reputation systems, but I think that's why it makes sense for each user to decide whether or not they want to be aware of that stuff. I've always been pretty disturbed by the 'popularity contest' nature of social media, and think that for myself, the slight mental health hit of paying attention to my reputation and the up/down votes of every comment is something I'd rather avoid, at least much of the time.

I'm aware that there are some scripts or some such that can do this, but I'm not extra tech savvy, and many people are less tech savvy than me, so having a simple setting would be great.

Having said that, it's great that the latest revision to the system went live. It now seems a lot more intuitive.

Pandantic , 11 months ago

Reputation Points.

Karma?

HappySerf , 11 months ago

Embrace the change!

Pandantic , 11 months ago

I’m not touting it, it’s a decent way to make sure that an account is reputable and behaving in a way conducive to the principles of the communities it’s participating in - “upvotes” means people like the things they are posting and saying which means they are good users. It’s just a little …familiar.

aroom , 11 months ago

upvote or downvote are not good indicator of the quality of a post. a controversial point of view can be of quality but still being downvoted.

Pandantic , 11 months ago

I understand what you're saying, but in a general sense, a person with good "Reputation Points" can be seen as contributing positively in the communities they are in. Even posting a controversial opinion and getting downvoted to hell (which I have done before on reddit) won't kill a person's Reputation Points / Karma. I'm still torn on whether it's a positive or not, but it can definitely used as an indicator of whether a person is being a positive member of the site.

However, @PositiveNoise brings up some of the negative points as well. Another being that it reinforces an echo chamber of ideas and stifles discussion, with unpopular but well-fashioned arguments being downvoted because they're disliked, not because they're harmful. And further, repost bots got tons of karma on reddit, upvoted by people who didn't see it the first time, which reduces the quality of the sub / community / magazine by burying OC that couldn't compete against an already proven successful picture / tweet / meme / etc.

It's a conversation. There are arguments for both sides imo.

aroom , 11 months ago

I strongly encourage this discussion, because at the end it's up to the users - the community - to decide how to use those tools. I think that we have an opportunity here to embrace new custom, and leave what was on reddit on reddit.

but I would argue that the quality argument is flawed in my opinion. upvote and downvote are more used as agreement / disagreement markers.

so if you agree with content, I can understand that you just want to use the upvote (who really is a favorite here in the fediverse) to let the poster know that their content had a positive impact on yourself. I'm cool with that and it's also good to avoid "+1" or "^^^^this" comments. But maybe it shouldn't be displayed (every upvote downvote boosts are public in the fediverse, anyone can have access to this info it's how ActivityPub works for now, just go to more>activity). Favorites are not that public on other platform, I guess only people from the same server are seeing it, or people you follow, I'm not sure about that.

but the downvote mechanism, who could imply a disagreement, is problematic to me. Because we should feel free to specify why we are in a disagreement. They can be so much reason for that and only a conversation, an exchange of thought can help us understand each other.

a simple click on the downvote button is more like a "shut up" for me. Not a really great way to express ourself, to express disagreement. And it's also too healthy in my opinion.

So yes the strongest issue with this mechanism is how it contribute to encourage a single discourse, a single point of view and tend to discourage users with other point of view to engage. It's really problematic for me.