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Actually it is not anonymity that makes Reddit (or HN) successful. It is pseudonymity. You still have an identity, and the identity has value - karma. It is jus
by zmmmmm 13y ago
Actually it is not anonymity that makes Reddit (or HN) successful. It is pseudonymity. You still have an identity, and the identity has value - karma. It is just disconnected from your biometric, "real life" identity.
The desire to protect the value of the pseudonymous identity is a powerful motivating force for making positive contributions. In many ways it is even more motivating than for your real life identity, because your real life, "biometric" identity is so precious that you will almost always favor low-zero risk contributions which are incredibly boring.
If Reddit was only anonymous it would be a horrible failure.
- bluefinity 13y ago4chan is anonymous. Last I checked, it wasn't a horrible failure, and in some ways actually works better, since there's no "karma whoring"[1]. The Japanese equivalent of Reddit (2channel) is enormously successful, possibly even more so than reddit, and it's anonymous. [1]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karma-whore http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karma-whore
- djent 13y agoEasier to read, all around better source of information: https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Likes https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Likes
- RandyRanderson 13y agoYes they just need to repair the karma with a tag system. So for example a user might have multiple karma values: karma-aww=2, karma-gonewild=1, karma-actual-content=1000, etc You'd have a much better site!
- chilldream 13y agoDoes this require different "types" of upvotes? If so, this kind of idea runs counter to sites like YouTube that have figured out that even things like 5-star rating systems are more complicated than users want to deal with.
- stevewillows 13y agoAt that point you're voting something 'cool' on Yelp.
- qu4z-2 13y agoIn fairness, 5-star rating systems are often useless anyway. People either like something or they don't. Who goes "Wow, this is cool, but ... only a bit cool."? Whereas being able to say "This is funny." or "This is interesting." has a much higher value to effort ratio, I think. I guess my issue is that you say "even" 5-star ratings, which I generally consider to be one of the worst voting interfaces, so I'm not surprised it doesn't work.
- RandyRanderson 13y agoCompletely agree - most ppl won't rate. The ones that do either are interested or not interested. If even a small fraction of the ones that do rate, rate something in a category, say karma-aww+=1 then algorithmically one could classify things pretty easily.
- nileshtrivedi 13y agoI don't think it requires that. The system can keep track of which subreddit the karma points were received in and display them accordingly.