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I've sometimes wondered a similar thing. Maybe keep the votes (even the down), but eliminate most the ways they're displayed aside from how they influence sorti

I've sometimes wondered a similar thing. Maybe keep the votes (even the down), but eliminate most the ways they're displayed aside from how they influence sorting. I don't see any problem with having a community moderation system. It's the aspects of gamification and public shaming that are troublesome. Do I really benefit from seeing my karma at the top right of every page? Does the community at large benefit from me seeing it? I'd be interested if sorting could be done better, too. The way that posts accumulate votes according to zipf's law together with a feedback effect where people mostly only read (and vote on) the top few comments means that there's a strong bias toward the discussion being dominated by the earliest posts. Ones that have had a chance to benefit from and be informed by points raised in earlier comments are at a bit of a disadvantage in the karmic rat race.

spiralx 5y ago
Slashdot's moderation system was amazingly effective given the complete hands off policy to comments on the site and anonymous posting was allowed without signing up. It's features were: * comment scores clamped between +5 and -1 * anonymous user comments started at 0 * comments at -1 were hidden by default (although you could set the threshold to whatever you wanted) * required a reason for moderation (Insightful/Interesting/Funny or Flamebait/Troll IIRC) * only gave out 5 "moderation points" at a time to users on a random basis * mod points expired after a few days, and IIRC not using them lowered your chance of receiving them in future * the pool of users who could receive mod points excluded the 10% most active posters on the site * you couldn't moderate in an article you'd commented in * if you commented in an article you'd moderated in, all those moderations were undone * there was a meta-moderation system where you could rate anonymous moderations as "fair" or "unfair", which would influence the chance of the moderating user receiving future mod points It was a complex system overall, but not really from the user's POV. The big difference was the idea of requiring moderation points in order to up- or down-vote comments, but I think clamping the lower-bound of comment scores would be an improvement even in systems where anyone can vote. They originally showed your total karma but changed it to a descriptive term to address karma whoring, anything over 50 was just "Excellent".

spiralx 5y ago

Slashdot's moderation system was amazingly effective given the complete hands off policy to comments on the site and anonymous posting was allowed without signing up. It's features were: * comment scores clamped between +5 and -1 * anonymous user comments started at 0 * comments at -1 were hidden by default (although you could set the threshold to whatever you wanted) * required a reason for moderation (Insightful/Interesting/Funny or Flamebait/Troll IIRC) * only gave out 5 "moderation points" at a time to users on a random basis * mod points expired after a few days, and IIRC not using them lowered your chance of receiving them in future * the pool of users who could receive mod points excluded the 10% most active posters on the site * you couldn't moderate in an article you'd commented in * if you commented in an article you'd moderated in, all those moderations were undone * there was a meta-moderation system where you could rate anonymous moderations as "fair" or "unfair", which would influence the chance of the moderating user receiving future mod points It was a complex system overall, but not really from the user's POV. The big difference was the idea of requiring moderation points in order to up- or down-vote comments, but I think clamping the lower-bound of comment scores would be an improvement even in systems where anyone can vote. They originally showed your total karma but changed it to a descriptive term to address karma whoring, anything over 50 was just "Excellent".