Imagine a reddit clone, but where your karma is not useless but actually reputation points : the better your reputation, the higher your post/comment is ranked.
Your reputation could be subreddit-scoped, and each subreddit could decide to value the existing reputation of a user based on their reputation on another subreddit : e.g. if you have a high reputation on /askhistorians, you automatically get a good one on /history_lovers, and inversely if you get a good reputation on /woman_beater you get a terrible reputation everywhere.
A specific system for new users similar to the one on StackOverflow could allow for a deeper check of new users/alt-accounts.
And in the end, people could vote on post to provide reputation without actually needing to see the name of the author, providing a better anonymity part : you're not anonymous to the website, but you're not doxxable by random users either.
Of course, this is not perfect (what if someone posts about history in a science subreddit, or vice versa), but it’s a start. AFAIK no platform has tried weighted voting yet.
So, how would a new user gain reputation, if their every comment is buried under all the karma farmers in every post?
Additionally servers could give users some bonus starting karma for free if they have, for example, a verified phone number and email tied to the account. This can be done privacy sensitive by simply having the home server give a boolean of whether or not that is the case. Just like in mastodon, this would be an honor based system, where if you lie, you might get kicked out of the network.
Combine it with something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861911 and I think one would be at a decent starting point.
> [...]
> If it costs something people would be more careful.
> The cost can be anything:
> - Classify 5 answers correctly
> - Pick answers from a multiple choice
> - Pay a dollar
> - Wait a few days to activate
> - etc
> Ideally the user should be able to choose a method that suits them but make the account worth something.
> [...]
And works, sometimes - there's a non-small number of people who have posted terrible things under their real names and suffered real-world consequences for it. It doesn't work often enough, however, to make it a real deterrent.
> Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy?
I dunno, it has its share of toxicity (but, really, no more than any other forum but also it's not a bastion of goodness either.)
Somewhat ironically, this is the same problem with tangentially related anti-piracy efforts: they punish the honest users but don't do anything to deter the dishonest ones.
Correct so far. Censorship doesn't encourage toxicity except by discouraging good actors disproportionately. I'll expand on this.
> It’s the lack of reputational cost to bad actors and the undeterred gathering of information.
Adding reputational cost has been tried, see "full name policies", Facebook comments on online newspapers etc.
It discourages the careful and does nothing to stop:
- those who think they are right and feel backed
- those who are too engaged anf don't care about their reputation
- those who doesn't understand that it is dumb to write dumb things under your full name
- trolls with fake but real-looking accounts
The result is an explosive mix: full name policies affect good, reasonable, level-headed actors far more than it affects trolls and zealots.
Don't you wonder why HN is such a nice place despite no full name policy? It is in part because everyone is exposed again and again to different perspectives from people wildly different from themselves who can dare to speqk up here.
This, together with good moderation result in compound interest (and then there is attrition so nothing grows into the sky).