We are building a P2P network with subjective moderation [0], so while we don’t know what works yet (we’re experimenting) I can at least tell you why we’ve found this is suboptimal. The issue is that this creates an even more direct USD/upvote market in which users are incentivised to the max to harvest as much karma as possible (with cat posts) and then sell them to the highest bidder, which would invariably be people who have a lot to gain from a certain piece of information being hidden. In essence, if you make karma spendable by more than one per post, you up it’s monetary value 100x, and given that even at 100x it’s worth so much more to PR teams and to not many else, all you will ever see is going to be propaganda on your platform’s front page.
The goal is to minimise the fraud load and make whatever fraud load you have applied against the strongest parts of your system. It’s like designing a castle except with incentives - it has to fail gracefully and still be functionally successful even in failure.
Arguably the common social media policy of not having your account tied to a unique identity needs to change. It permits all sorts of problematic incentives like you describe, and which lead to bot accounts and more.
Of course, your identity doesn't need to be disclosed in your profile for when anonymity is important.
What about:
weighting a vote by the "degree of separation" of the voter? (ie., friends count more)
hyperbolic discounting of karma acquisition
limiting the number of voters per item
new accounts can't vote until achived a network & karam status (eg., shares, by friends, are upvoted).
accounts which primarily upvote/downvote outside of their network are ignored
etc.
We call that user-selectability ‘subjective moderation’, but it’s basically a client-side compiler for a people-based raw data feed.
It is great as a poor man's analytics system, providing knowledge that at least someone read your comment, allowing you to evaluate if it is worth posting more or if your efforts are disappearing into the void. However, having both up and down seems redundant. The both provide the exact same information.
> however what is dumb is that neither has a cost.
If there is a cost then there will be reduced incentive to let you know that your comment was read, which reduces future engagement, which is not ideal for the platform.
I disagree. If a comment has 100 likes and 100 dislikes that clearly is different than a comment that has 200 likes or 200 dislikes. A new metric, controversiality is created when you look at both the total amount of likes and dislikes and the ratio between them given a comment. Depending on your inclination a comment with a high, equal number of likes and dislikes is perhaps more engaging than the same number of solely likes or dislikes.
> If there is a cost then there will be reduced incentive to let you know that your comment was read, which reduces future engagement, which is not ideal for the platform.
Depending on how it's implemented, this may or may not matter. For example you could allow people to like or dislike without limit, but after a certain amount (them exhausting their own karma) its effect changes, but regardless they can continue to do it.
Reddit already applied this at the aggregate scale: any individual comment can only cost you up to 100 karma and negative karma scores on user profiles are capped at -100.
That all said, how would these karma economy proposals interact with the fact that some subreddits are orders of magnitude less popular than others? Would it cost less to vote on items in small subreddits?
Would upvoting already highly-upvoted submissions be free (but do nothing on the back end) or would it be expensive as an encouragement that the community has already spoken and to spend your votes elsewhere? Would doing against community opinion be cheap (since more people agreeing the Earth is round doesn’t add much to the discussion) or would it be a pricey 10x vote?
Sorting by "controversy" has been an option on Reddit for a long time. Most people won't use this option, but it exists.
The formula is here: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/753b17407e9a9d...
There is no information provided by the button click other than that the button was clicked. Which button the user decides to choose may as well be considered arbitrary because onlookers have no way of ever determining the true intent unless the button presser also comments with their intent.
I find it curious that what was up/down has changed to like/dislike in your comment. Being able to see that someone read your comment is the reward provided by these 'karma' systems. Nobody wants to spend a slice of their life writing something that nobody will ever read. Finding readership is the goal and creating content with enough quality that someone wants to go out of their way to tell you that they read it is how you validate that you are accomplishing your goal. Either button can convey that information. With that, isn't 'dislike' logically no button press? If you truly dislike something, why do you want to reward the author?
It's very clear that absolute vote count is a meaningless number. The vote count depends on which side of the argument that the reader belongs to. The simpler side of the argument will therefore attract more upvotes.
What the writer of the comment ultimately cares about is how many people were against the writer's comment that is now for it. Or at the very least, a piece of the argument has pushed the Overton window for that individual so that if they continue reading that writer's post and those whom allegiance with them, they will flip. That must be a vanishingly small number of the votes. Votes don't give you that.
It's very clear from my perspective that randomdata's post was made in good faith. randomdata's argument is one of clarity from understanding this nuance. He doesn't go into this depth, but it's there. The only way that you make the argument that randomdata is making is after having comes to terms with the mechanics. As he has skipped showing this depth his comment is unable to bring those of which understand the simpler argument but don't understand his argument, and he is therefore down-voted for it.
The fact that it has taken me five paragraphs to explain this nuance and not even go into it myself is why Twitter can be such a nasty place, as you don't have five paragraphs.
I'm now making this post 12 hours later, right when the post is at the bottom of the frontpage is therefore about to fall off a cliff of readability. As I care about getting my message across, I'm in complete agreeance with randomdata's argument. (+200 / -200) is much more important to me than ( +3 / -4). It's very likely the only person who might read this at this point is randomdata, of which I am speaking to the choir and achieving no change of view.
Not only is "there is no info provided by which button was clicked" a really odd take when we humans explicitly assign semantic to up/down vote, this contradicts your other point, which is that "having your post read is the real reward," since there is no guarantee the post was read before voting.
What kind of semantic would that be? Using a real-world example, some of the comments I have made in this thread have had the up button pressed multiple times. Others the down button multiple times. There is no difference in the comments. The are all about the same subject, all written by me about that subject. There is no discernible explanation for the difference. All I know is that the buttons were pressed. There is no more information provided to me.
> this contradicts your other point, which is that "having your post read is the real reward," since there is no guarantee the post was read before voting.
How so? My "other point" (it is the same point) explicitly calls out that those guarantees are not made, using an accidental press as an example.
but it would to cool to see if any research could be done on stuff like seeing how different features (or lack of) lead to different communities and cultures on a site
Innovating means new patterns of interactions & ideas. This also means new forms of monetisation that might be required.
As an example all the previous FB & instagram ads became obsolete or useless once they introduced stories. Now, have to create better ad formats and subsequently take few quarters to fine tune the experience and pricing.
like I think something like "sustained high quality discussion" is good goal other spaces like HackerNews aim for
a: human and discrete
b: in good faith while of differing opinion still
This is not true. As long as social networks have a worldwide reach and a real-world significance, it'll be valuable to accumulate bots/minions to compose an aggregate person, representing some force or entity, and then use that brigade to direct discourse.
If it becomes expensive to do this, it takes the behavior out of the hands of small groups and reserves it for the most powerful and well-resourced actors.
The question to ask here is how expensive karma farming will be, and how easily can it be coordinated by outside forces in the absence of 'good faith, discrete, human actors'.
It is, but partly there's a good reason: it is really hard creating a system that is better, similarly convenient but also not more prone to abuse by bots and similar attempts to gain an advantage.
The more valuable karma gets for voting, the more worthwhile efforts to "farm" karma become. Ideally you want to maximise one thing and minimise the other but they are linked.
It's like with the recent case where a large-scale mining operation was discovered, but instead of cryptocurrency they used game consoles to farm currency for EA's FIFA game which can then be sold for real money because thanks to microtransactions and definitely-not-gambling-boxes it gained real value.
Logged-in users are occasionally asked to apply a few moderation points to comments, but are also subject to their moderation actions being reviewed in turn.
So a few users only have to band together and target one individual to limit their karma spend?
Of course this leads to the question: if voting has a cost, then how do people accumulate irrespective of themselves receiving a vote?
You could give everyone say, a fixed number of karma to begin with that could then be allocated. You can then give people more karma for successfully being a user without being flagged or receiving certain amounts of negative karma for a time period.
It's a shame there's not more experimentation here. This could lead to more interesting sort of dynamics. For example, if the #1 person believes something is being said that is really damaging in some way, they could put at stake the entirety of their karma and downvote it, which would pretty much obliterate the comment. Conversely, if someone is speaking a truth no one else is acknowledging someone with a lot of karma could sacrifice a good chunk to bring it right to the top.