Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Against Karma:
-People care way too much about karma, and avoid doing things like voicing their opinion or making certain posts if the post they are making could get downvotes.

-Karma is a popularity contest that promotes circlejerking and ostracizes independent thought.

-Karma might stop people who are new to the site from voicing their actual opinions to avoid having their karma in the negatives.

-All karma does is encourage conformity and circlejerking, by both promoting it with upvotes and shaming those who won’t conform with downvotes.

-Downvotes now are used more of a way to show you disagree, without having to give a reason why. Disagreeable opinions that may be well founded and argued are hidden, just because people disagree. Random 21 has gone into the comment section and tried to bring this up, and well, it worked well as an example of people down voting to show they didn’t like what they were being told.

-Useless comments get moved to the top that are only complaining about things like “another photofad” or “Don strikes again” which do nothing to help contribute to the article or conversation.

-Karma is based on an opinionated system. And uses a crowd to judge somebodies character. If a person has high Karma, that person thinks everyone likes them. They can get over their head about it and become an obnoxious brat.

-The Closed Circle System is both a good and a bad thing in this situation. On one hand, it does promote a positive mindset in the forums. On the other hand, it can be just as easily abused. It doesn’t matter how hateful your comment is, if you have friends here they will upvote your posts no matter what. This is why Oldfags oftentimes get away with being complete assholes and not be downvoted to hell.

-Because it’s anonymous, it can be abused. Stalkers mindlessly upvoting or downvoting certain users because they like or hate them. Or people using alternate accounts to promote themselves. Or the previously mentioned "use freinds to get lots-o-votes."

-You already have the pac-man chart on your profile to show how much you contribute. This system , which has proven to sometimes misrepresent the quality of your contributions, does more harm than good.

-Shitposts are nearly always someone posting something they think is funny, in order to get karma. If you want proof of that, I’d suggest looking through any given thread in the past

-If someone were to make a post worthy of being buried, a mod can just remove it.

-Without karma, users will be forced to voice their opinions with words or simply not speak, which will encourage discussion of topics rather than unexplained +1 or -1’s

-Users will not be able to make uneducated assessments as to another user’s personality or worth based on their karma if it is removed.

- Users will no longer be able to wear their karma amount as some sort of badge attesting to their greatness.

- Karma allows abuse through group downvoting, hiding otherwise acceptable posts.

-If something has no point, it is fair to argue that it should be removed to reduce clutter, but the issue is not that users think it is pointless as much as that it is a problem, which is why it is a talking point.

-Original arguments against the implimentation of karma, the fact that It only causes circle jerks and hivemind mentality, still hold up today. If a system can not redeem itself after four years of existence, it’s about time for massive reform or total removal. Karma is not used for its main intention, and because it’s anonymous, it never will be.

-Otherwise buriable posts can just be left to be ignored

-Burying was implemented for the purpose of hiding spam or gore in the case of mods not being present. As mod activity has increased, this is no longer necessary.

-Karma is like censorship performed by a majority, it prevents an actual discussion and argumentation, since people who can’t come up with anything, just press one of the magic buttons and feel as if they have contributed something, it also stigmatises the downvoted/hidden post and the represented opinion and “devalues” the poster’s arguments in the eyes of many.

-Most people reply with reaction GIFs anyway, because they know they’ll get upvoted for it if they do (mainly a comment issue, but an issue regardless)

So there's your arguments, for and against so far. This is an issue I've been discussing for a while now, if mostly in regards to the comment section. If possible, this is an issue I'd like to see resolved.

Thanks for making a list for both standpoints R21.

However I would like to point that in most of these issues that if the users agree on what should be given negative and positive karma and stick to their word most of these issues can be worked around.

A lot of what you see here is it can do this and it allows that. Should we get rid of it because it can be abused? Should we get rid of it because it was abused? Or should we stop and prevent further abuse?

I feel as if I am repeating myself and many people are sick of it. If I do post again it shouldn't be directly linked to the main point I have been raising.

what about the compromise i posted earlier

Well on that note, Possible solutions:
- Remove Karma

-Keep Karma

-Only Display recent Karma on somebodies profile. Maybe a 6 Month to Year Period. This removes all Forever Statistics that are Opinionated.

-Create another system that rewards people for doing things other than posting good material. This could involve adding an easy to use Title Tree where you will be able to see all of your titles for each category they post in. With increasing benchmarks as people level up. Titles nobody has gotten yet. Something to strive for other than Karma. This will give us a more comprehensive forever statistic

-Create an option when making a new thread that allows users to disable or enable karma

How about putting a name to the upvotes and downvotes. So if I like or dislike your post you know it was me, put an end to drive-by downvotes and upvotes. If someone already suggested this I'm sorry.

I'm just throwing this idea out there because i've seen it on other forums. I would like to see karma done away with personally.

As I implied earlier, I would rather mess around with the system before potentially axing it. There should be a way to get a voting system to work favorably, though both of my ways would take a bit of time to implement. I was kinda hoping to see more people give ideas on how a karma system could work rather than just treating the issue like it was black and white. (Edit: Blubber you Psychic Ninja)

I love Captain Blubber's idea.

Honestly, I think this would cause more trouble. Along with the transparency of knowing who's supporting what, that kind of system also might result in infighting between users.

Not any more infighting than an actual debate, which would be the case if there was no Karma at all.

Karma is an imaginary number that's about as important as any other number that we use for such sorts of things. All it is, is an ego boost. The same goes for subscribers on Youtube, followers/reblogs on tumblr, friends on Facebook, etc.

Not to say it's a good thing. If Billy the Bastard boasts he has 200 friends on facebook and you have 18 (18 friends who comment and like all your statuses), he'll use that against you as a "no-life". If Randy the Random-Guy has 100 karma and you have 0, he'll call you a noob and make the entire experience on the site shit.

Karma is needed to make people feel good, but unneeded to make feel bad.

tl;dr:

Karma is OK in some occurances, but some people are like Karma hoarders and it kinda could make some users feel bad, like a user with +200 could be mad of +7,000 karma users

I call it Karma Envy

I'd prefer this option myself: Everyone stops reacting to karma like its actually this big deal. But that ain't ever gonna happen. So we need to work out solutions

@blubber

How about putting a name to the upvotes and downvotes.

I think this myself. And I think that's a good compromise between having it or nothing at all.

I believe the anonymity is what causes a lot of the sting and offense around the whole system. People can use it without really thinking. And when usage of the karma system goes uncontrolled, that's when people get upset. I don't think things like total karma counts or stuff like that is where the tension really comes from. Most people don't care about how much karma you have/have not

Removing the anonymity will give pause to the often asked question: "WHO DOWNVOTED ME? WHY?" so people can question the downvoter instead of the system

Removing anonymity would also give users a reason to stop and think before clicking that button. They need to have an excuse for it before they click in case someone comes back asking questions. The bombing runs would die instantly. Anyone who does it can be suspended.

No anonymity also slightly helps against the threat of circlejerks suppressing opinions. Because you'll be able to see where the support is really coming from. Whether its from "the unwashed masses"/"the collective hivemind" or from some circlejerking friends or a bunch of alt accounts or legitimately from a range of honest people because the post was actually good.

Bottom line is that if karma is just used responsibly. It would never be an issue. And taking the internet dickwad factor out of it will help encourage responsible use.

I can imagine this being implemented by having a list of names pop up when you hover over the karma number.

But no matter how you go about it, it means work. Honestly the easiest and simplest solution is just outright removal. In my web development experience: stripping features is always easier than appending features. There's more support against than for, so that option wins democratically and those who miss it will need to just deal. Do we need it? The straightforward answer is no.

With or without upvotes / downvotes, the opinion that's less popular on the internet pretty much anywhere you go will always get snuffed out, in kym's case either by a little red number or by what we can only realistically expect if we remove the system – at least twice as many nasty replies than before in the comments sections. Without it, I think kym would be an even more hostile environment to dissenting opinion. So in that sense I think it is important.

Personally I like karma the way it is, I think that the site would be a little less fun and interactive without it and just suddenly removing anonymity to the system would probably cause a lot of drama. If it only effected posts made after implementation though I'd be all for it.

Also I propose that we change whether we give a post positive or negative. I've had a couple of times where I have accidentally given negative or positive or I have changed me mind and would have given no karma.

I'm going to keep my post short and simple. No, we don't, since people abuse the power to upvote and downvote.

I guess what we should do is try and get James in to see if it would be possible to implement Blubber's idea. But at the very least, we can safely say that the way karma works needs to change.

I can imagine this being implemented by having a list of names pop up when you hover over the karma number.

I can show which users upvoted and downvoted a post but some posts have dozens of upvoters/downvoters so we would probably need to think of another way to show the info.

Get the other KYM staff involved in this and see what they have to say.

Thanks James, I'll see if I can get Brad to come join the discussion.

This may sound crazy, but can we maybe have polls or something for what will change? That way it's more, democratic.

@James

I was thinking of a JQuery dialog that can pop up when you click on a posts karma. And in that dialog you can fit anything you want. The window can use scrollbars to account for long lists of voters

I've somewhat followed this post and think I have an idea

Now, most of this is built off of Blubber's idea. So give him the credit.

Anyway, anyone remember True Crime, Streets of L.A.?

That game had a unique system of "Stars" (using the GTA's as reference)

You played as a "no rules cop bla bla something tragic backstory" but you were awarded for doing good deeds (arresting people, stopping crime, capturing criminals using non-lethal force, etc)

and would be awarded +badges that would go all the way to +99. Now, the higher you were in the +badges you would get benefits(backup from other cops blah blah you get the point) that would increase with your + number.

The same with -badges(killing people, etc. etc) Negative badge range meant other cops would go from ignoring you to actually coming after you.

Now, apply that to our situation. Give new members(probably everyone else too) a starting point of 0. From there, they can decide how they would like to go from there. Positive badges(upvotes whatever) would be awarded for productive or positive activity. While simpleminded, un-thought through comments/uploads(whatever) would be awarded with negative badges. That would cause people to consider their actions before a possible shitpost(unless it was an actual shitpost thread)

One setback though, is how to dish out these "badges". Maybe give each user 10 every six months or something(that's all I got)

Now, combine that with the already established upvote/downvote system but abolish this:

(Keeping up with upvotes/downvotes count). Essentially making the forum similar to the main site's image/video/meme galleries.

Feel free to tweak it, or let me know if you think the idea stinks. I really believe it could work.

Forum karma is not awarded sparsely. Even the most mundane of posts, when made by a mod or well-known user, will get upwards of 5, 10, even 20 karma points. The only reason that comment karma is even higher is because more people visit the comment sections than the forums.

The problem is that the karma system encourages shitposting for the sake of humor, which doesn't contribute to the quality of the forums.

And oldfags definitely care about karma. Hell, it upsets me if I'm in a thread where people are getting tons of karma and I get very little.

I'm not convinced that showing who gave karma on each post would do anything to prevent 'circlejerking'. If user X notices that user Y is upvoting a lot of his posts and downvoting people who argue against him, surely he'd be more likely to see Y's posts in a positive light. Hence he'd be more likely to upvote back, and so on. I imagine it either wouldn't have any effect at all, or it'd just make it worse. It would give people a means with which to easily scrounge for attention from popular users.

There's also a lot of potential for drama. If I see a really poorly thought-out and offensive post, I like being able to show my disapproval anonymously. If I have to respond in person, or have my name attached to the negative karma, that draws me in to the discussion, and often I'd prefer to just stay the hell out of there. Honestly, I'd probably stop giving negative karma altogether if I knew my name was going to be shown.

Against what seems to be the consensus in this thread, I actually quite like the karma system. If I put 20 minutes into a post, I like being able to find it a while later to see that it's been upvoted. It means I know that some people appreciated me putting the effort into it. As for negative karma, if I get a lot of downvotes, I'll know that I'm either not welcome in a particular thread or that I've said something thoughtless. I think feedback is important, whether positive or negative, and karma offers a convenient way with which to give it.

I also like how it allows us to partially moderate the content here. I don't think we should be expecting our forum mods to trawl through every single thread to look for poor posts, and the decision as to whether something is a 'shitpost' shouldn't be forced on them alone. From what I've heard, often it's stressful enough for them to lock threads that seem redundant due to the risk of negative responses from the community. That'll be a whole lot worse if the blame is placed solely on them whenever somebody has their post deleted and feels it was undeserved.

Also, I don't see why it's such a bad thing if it's discouraging people from posting their offensive opinions and encouraging people to post things that we actually want to see. Some may call that 'circlejerking' – I just see it as a decent community spirit. Plus it cuts down on drama, and that's always a good thing. Yes, the system is often abused, and that sucks, but it's used correctly far more often than not. I don't think that a minority of people who can't use it responsibly is a valid reason to scrap the system altogether.

Yes but as it has been said before people will most likely post more reaction images because they can't give karma and it's an easy way to respond without even saying anything.

You are also speaking for yourself. You being an oldfag and caring about karma does not mean all do. Also if internet points (or lack of) upsets you, you should reconsider what karma means to you.

@Algernon

I don’t think we should be expecting our forum mods to trawl through every single thread to look for poor posts

Then what's the point of their existence? Bragging rights? Enforcing mods to do their job only when convenient doesn't really make for good moderation.

If I put 20 minutes into a post, I like being able to find it a while later to see that it’s been upvoted.

And I bet you would also be happy to come back and see that it's been downvoted, because karma is a free system and a good thing for the community, right? Liking karma just because you get karma does not give you any credit.

Some may call that ‘circlejerking’ – I just see it as a decent community spirit.

I'm not sure how to respond to this, it's just too funny.

@Spider-byte

Also if internet points (or lack of) upsets you, you should reconsider what karma means to you.

I'm not sure how mocking a user for caring about karma is a good argument on why we should keep karma. Really shooting yourself in the foot there.

@Taryn Except I believe there is a use for karma. But being upset about it is taking it too far. Also considering that he cares for it but wants it gone is beyond me.

I'm for the karma system staying. I think it's a shitty system, prone to circlejerking and abuse, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Philip says a Forum Moderator's job is to remove shitposts. Well…

…unless we revamp the rules to allow mods to delete posts, it isn't. Deleting posts or editing them unless they break the no gore/porn rules is a no-no.

You could have several well thought-out posts, someone literally posts a picture of a dog taking a shit, and now it's there forever – shitstaining that page. Karma, at this time, gives the option to grey it out.

I'll meet you guys halfway though. If James could implement a way for mods to manually "hide" posts, similar to how karma automatically does it now, I'd be more okay with its removal.

I'm more against the revelation of names if karma is kept. I don't see it being beneficial, but just a kind of morbid interest in users seeing who agrees with them. You're really not interested in what individual people think, but whether or not that person you like/dislike downvoted you.

• If, say, Daikaiju upvoted/downvoted my posts – I'm not going to give a shit. I don't know who that even is. I just saw his name in one of the recent posts.
• If Verbose upvoted/downvoted my posts – It's either going to contribute to the circlejerk issues many of you have mentioned, or cause in-fighting between us.
• If Blubber upvoted/downvoted my posts – I'm going to be either confused, or roll my eyes at what I believe to be his childish behavior.
  Note: these are examples. You three are more complicated people than this.
  Yes, even you Blubber.
  
  If all of Pony General runs to my defense for posting a horse in a non-horse thread, the non-ponyfags will just roll their eyes at how "autistic" we all are.
  
  Deploying this as a feature is just going to exacerbate the issues that we already have. You're expected to upvote a friend. You're expected to downvote that person who is unpopular. Anonymity allows you to quietly place your vote in an opinion without revealing yourself. It's not going to cause people to be more careful with where they place their precious kramas, it's just going to make an already divisive community even more at odds with each other.

I agree it's the job of the moderators to keep order, but you can't expect them to be here all the time.

I'm surprised. For a person who really doesn't like the favoritism you view the moderators from having, you vouching for them to be the judgement of a common posts quality is quite ballsy.

And for your information; currently we are only allowed to act on rules of the website, which don't dictate the minimum quality of a post.

Otherwise we would have deleted every +1, Personal Attack on the OP, and Banned the vast majority of the comments section for rule violation.

And also this post for attempting to tell us how to do our job. Vast majority of us get quite bitter about that~<3

A lot of people are comparing karma to censorship. Then people go around saying karma is useless because the mods should be deleting anything that they deem a shitpost. I would just like to point out that the latter actually is censorship while the former is not.

If the showing posts thing is going to happen, why not do it like Facebook? (Ex: Bobby Joe and 4 others upvoted your post and Billy Joe and 2 others downvoted your post. You could then click and open up another window which shows the full list of people who rated your comment.

@Philip
Currently I'm working on improving moderation of the comment section, as I have stated in other threads before. And I can vouch that trying to find all the things Nats mentioned is incredibly hard work. I'd need to be checking an entry multiple times a day if I hoped on catching everyone when they post anything against the rules, and that's with the added joy of dealing with the people who complain at me for an hour about how I'm in the wrong for enforcing the rules. Expecting moderators to clean up all the shitposts would be near impossible, all things considered. And like Nats said, we can't even delete all the shitposts, as we aren't even allowed to do that. Trust me, if I could delete all the comment section's shit while I'm moderating the comments, I would, but that's not how it works.

I'm not going to get angry at you, because I get where you're coming from kinda, but when it comes down to it, expecting us to be able to moderate so much is kind of impossible.

@Tchefuncte Bonaparte
That's the thing I don't get, people are already complaining that we moderate too harshly, and yet they're asking us to increase the harshness? I don't really get the logic there.

@Random21 and the Other Moderators following this thread:

Would you trust yourself to be able to correctly quality control the forum and shoulder all the hate you would get for doing so?

If No, Would you have been able to do something like that if there was only four primary boards like before?

And lastly, give us an insight on how many moderator hours you think would be needed to be able to accomplish the task of quality controlling the entirety of the current forums without organization (us browsing like we usually would). And how many with organization (each moderator patrolling a specific board/s)?

Because really, if we can't handle that, there should be no way in hell we would axe the Karma System completely.

People may argue that it's "Our Jobs", but people also forget that we are Volunteers and Unpaid. There is only so much we can do. I'm only able to be on for 10+ hours a day because I am on summer break. That will immediately dip down to 4 hours a day as soon as school starts and even lower after the Midterm.

Edit: I am mainly requesting an opinion on this because I would like to confirm or debunk the myth of us having the manpower needed to do that RIGHT NOW.

@Nats
I have a full time job: between 40 – 50 hrs per week. I also live on my own, so all the household upkeep is mine.

Even if I were to spend all my time where I'm not doing life stuff weeding the forum, I doubt I could do it alone.

@Nats:
During summer/winter break sure I'd have the time to do it, but during the school year I'm going to classes full time, working a job, and doing homework any time in between, there's no way I'd have the time or the patience to weed through shitposts, especially if I'm not getting paid for it.

Even if I had all the time in the world, if I were given the responsibility of quality checking every post and subsequently getting criticized by the users for every edit/deletion I did I would say fuck that noise and quit. I am a moderator and I have the best interest of the forums at heart, but I am here to have fun first and foremost and the day I stop having fun because it's "expected" of me to treat this like a legitimate job is the day I pack my bags and leave.

Not to mention mods are getting enough flack from users because some of us take our job too seriously, I highly doubt the first thing we need to do is start taking our moderation even more seriously.

Dear forum moderators, please stop acting like modship is a spell cast upon you by a wicked witch instead of power granted to you under the assumption that you could handle this sort of thing.

My first idea was more of a drive-by suggestion so whether you guys like it or are against it is fine by me.

honestly, karma is pretty useless for the forums because if you say something rude or idiotic someone will vocalize it. And there is nothing wrong with a post that says "way to go" or "great job OP" so i think it can pretty much be done away with.

Comments are a different issue, since there are a fuckload it's tough to figure out. good karma posts get featured, which would be cool if they were about where the meme originated or where it spread instead of "OMG DON AT IT AGAIN" or something. So the system is broken.

I'm just spitballing but maybe we could have 2 buttons for comments "helpful" and "request hidden". so the ones with the most "helpful" get bumped to the top and if enough requests come in to have something hidden moderators would get an email and we could hide them.

would people abuse the system, i'm not sure but if you guys have ideas then that would be cool too.

^

That's a fantastic idea, and I almost never use the word fantastic.

I like it except for having to wait for the mods to hide it. It seems like all that time people still have to look at the dogshit instead of being able to hide it themselves. If the request hidden button is used it should hide it for the users who requested it.

I agree with Blubber's proposal. There's no harm in posting something in the forums to approve or disapprove of a post, instead of using karma to do so; and the alternate karma system in the comments could work well, too, since that's what should be happening there anyway.

this is a good idea, so why not both? if you click it it's hidden for you and enough clicks and a mod would hide it for everyone.

@About liking comments and shit

How about a system like this?

For example:

@Loli
Captain Blubber already suggested something like that.

@Loli
We discussed that possibility, but we brought up the fact that it could cause even more circlejerking, if people notice that certain others keep upvoting them, then it might cause the two users to keep upvoting each other.

Also if that example is referring to Tokyo Ghoul then I have to say that I really don't agree with people calling Kaneki whiny for not just getting on with his new powers. Like I can remember seeing someone call him bad because he didn't want to eat a human. I mean, he lived his life as a human up until that point, and people expect him to just turn around and be perfectly okay with being okay with eating humans? That's not how it works.

But that was kind of off topic.

I'm against that idea.

Some take karma and votes too serious, and they will go to the downvoters and demand explanation. It will turn karma and votes into a witchhunt. This is why the idea of displaying vote names was considered not smart by the staff in the past.

Upvotes on the other hand can turn into attention whoring. Upvote a specific user and hope senpai notices you. Background dicksucking.

check my cool new idea

R21 wrote:

We discussed that possibility, but we brought up the fact that it could cause even more circlejerking, if people notice that certain others keep upvoting them, then it might cause the two users to keep upvoting each other.

Oh well, nothing important has been added to the discussion then.

Also if that example is referring to Tokyo Ghoul then I have to say that I really don’t agree with people calling Kaneki whiny for not just getting on with his new powers. Like I can remember seeing someone call him bad because he didn’t want to eat a human. I mean, he lived his life as a human up until that point, and people expect him to just turn around and be perfectly okay with being okay with eating humans? That’s not how it works.

Read the manga.

The commentators on our site nowadays call "BAN ALL ADVICE ANIMALS" and "STOP DON" helpfull comments.

The tumor of the comment section is not so much the voting system as it's more just the comment posters. A new system will only fix certain consequences, but doesn't get rid of the source. It's a decent idea, but I fear abuse and that it won't change much.