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I think up and down voting are great, however what is dumb is that neither has a cost. If you think of karma as an economy, taking an action should have a cost.

• cjsawyer 5y ago
  Each user gets 10 votes per day, and can only vote up or down on a topic once?
  • abraae 5y ago
    Each user gets 10 points per day, and can use it in a single vote or spread across hundreds?
• randomdata 5y ago
  > I think up and down voting are great 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.
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
    • judge2020 5y ago
      This is basically what people did on their own when they say a tweet gets "ratioed" by having more quote retweets than likes - the downvote button is probably just turning that into a first-party feature.
    • randomdata 5y ago
      > 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. 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?
• yellow_lead 5y ago
  I like your ideas that voting should have a cost. I think though that your last paragraph (staking much of your karma) would inevitably lead to a karma market and marketers abusing the feature.
  • bigyikes 5y ago
    Then I guess the only thing we can do is create a Karma Exchange Commission to regulate karma transactions. Obviously we must provide karma wages to those working for the Commission, so we’ll also need to collect a karma tax for funding purposes.
• ausbah 5y ago
  I really do think innovative in social media spaces in lacking, probably because the established players have no real reason to change things up aside from stealing newcomers's ideas 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
  • tayo42 5y ago
    How do you define success for these experiments? Social media already is optimizing for engagement, probably the average hn commenter doesn't like those results though.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      Agreed. Wondering why social media companies aren’t trying to make the platforms less engaging is like wondering why drug dealers aren’t making a less addictive opiate.
    • ausbah 5y ago
      obviously every platform wants engagement, they want you to use their product over others! but I think that's only part of how you define success, which obviously will differ platform to platform like I think something like "sustained high quality discussion" is good goal other spaces like HackerNews aim for
  • Artistry121 5y ago
    Matrix and the power of decentralized federated social networks will allow this soon.
    • cvwright 5y ago
      Yes it will! https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
    • mistermann 5y ago
      Does Matrix support full extensibility of data structures or are you tied to some minimal model?
• devoutsalsa 5y ago
  I use voting to keep track of whether I’ve watched something before or not. There’s not really a good way to tell most sites you don’t want to see the same thing twice.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  Quora used to have a cool "credits" system where you got credits for creating popular content and then you could use those credits to boost other content. So if there was an answer you liked you could spend your credits to expose that answer to more people. It was fun if a bit pointless.
• guelo 5y ago
  The source of karma is the attention people pay. That's why it's referred to as the attention economy.
• rolleiflex 5y ago
  > 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. 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. [0] https://getaether.net https://getaether.net
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    You've probably thought of this, but if you can associate votes to identities then a classic way to mitigate this behaviour is quadratic weighting, where e.g. your nth vote costs n^2, so a censor or propagandist needs to pay 1e4 counteract the single votes of 100 casual observers.
    • rolleiflex 5y ago
      Yeah, quadratic voting is one of the potential solutions to this, but ultimately that removes the ‘fraud load’ by mostly moving it to another place, to number of accounts. That is arguably worse because it incentivises the malicious users to create as many accounts as there are votes so as to not be subject to quadratic voting (1 vote = 1 energy point equivalency only holding at one vote), and it’s substantially harder to deal with user account fraud than vote fraud. 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.
      • mjburgess 5y ago
• aloisdg 5y ago
  Stack Overflow did it quite well imho
  • EugeneOZ 5y ago
    there is no “group thinking” issue on StackOverflow. Quite contrary :)
• alpaca128 5y ago
  > It's a shame there's not more experimentation here. 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.
• Applejinx 5y ago
  I think it's important to acknowledge that in social networks attempting to manage their communities through mechanisms like this, there's a tacit assumption that everyone participating is 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'.
• whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  >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. So a few users only have to band together and target one individual to limit their karma spend?
  • endisneigh 5y ago
    Sure but the entire point was that they’d have to pay for that privilege. Presumably you could make subsequent blocks exponentially expensive.
• wildsatchmo 5y ago
  Twetch is an experiment in exactly this. Pay to like, comment, "branch" as they call it (retweet). pow.market is another fascinating experiment using proof of work as the currency that could be integrated into these platforms. ctzn.network is another take but no payments going on there. "Karma as a token" is what I think of based on your description and it's really cool. I think in the next couple of years there will be a lot more experimentation in this area too. It's a perfect storm of censorship, bots, and fake news that are encouraging more experiments now. There are others I'm aware of that are not yet public that I'm most excited about though. It's definitely happening.
• tlavoie 5y ago
  How about meta-moderation, like what is used on Slashdot? 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.