Echoing this, that was an excellent suggestion by @Catch42. There should be capped karma and magazine specific karma.

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I've seen many forums do tier rating systems for posters, so you didn't see any numbers but more of a generalized ranking from Novice to Veteran. The rank names shouldn't imply anything other than experience in posting, so avoid things like "Expert". It still gives some credence to a poster who has a high rank, but doesn't mean much beyond a flair. Much like Reddit trophies of account age...great, you've been here ten years, what did you do with it?

The argument then shifts to where the lines of rank are, but I don't think that's too important, although honestly if you can post for a month and become a Seasoned Veteran it might be too low. (Thinking of you, Frontier. Not every player should be Elite.)

The boost thing is something different. I like the idea of its supposed function, to push updated or valued content into the feeds more, but clearly the user manual needs work. Should we just have the same as everyone else with an up and down vote, where the upvote does a boost and counts towards rank, while a downvote is simply a visual of either disagreement or unfavorable content but doesn't do much (maybe drops the post lower but that's it).

I'm increasingly convinced that general reputation points should just go. They're not about reputation at all. They're about making social media more addictive.

Large positive scores are meaningless without knowing where they came from. And even then, they can be farmed. Same for large negative ones.

What do people actually use the score for? To determine whether some else is worth engaging with? 9 times out of 10, you can tell just from the post - people acting in bad faith are pretty easy to spot. If someone's being a prick, they can be ignored even if they're usually a level headed and nice person 99% of the time. If someone's JAQing off, or sea-lioning, they'll make it known in short order.

A number doesn't tell us what to do about it.

Breakdowns by group is a good idea. Maybe expand that idea to give a count of posts and comments by group, too. Not necessarily viewable by everyone, but at least by mods and admins.

I agree, Internet points are just useless. The points should be useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, but in judging a user's contribution? I dealt with trolls and assholes with 50-100k karma back in Reddit, it's not an indication of the quality of a user, just the amount of time they spent in popular subs posting popular content.

If possible, I think the karma/rep score should be completely hidden. As long as people can see a number, they're going to try and game it somehow, which incentivizes low quality posts. You can cap total karma, but people will still try to grind up to 5000 and they'll still try to get the highest comment scores they can. That encourages people to make the types of low-effort posts and jokes that often clog up Reddit threads.

The other problem with an overall rep score is that it doesn't truly represent user behavior. If 1/3 of my posts are shitty troll posts, but the other 2/3 are generic low-effort joke posts and memes that people will upvote by default, my rep will stay positive even though I'm a net negative contributor. Likewise, if I make one really popular post that gets 90,000 upvotes, my score will stay positive pretty much forever, even if I troll and harass people nonstop.

So rather than report the sum of a user's post scores, I would propose displaying a "user quality" indicator based on the average score of their recent posts instead. If your average is greater than ~5, you get a green up arrow, and if your average is less than ~5, you get a red down arrow. Otherwise you get a neutral icon. You could have other icons for higher and lower scores, but I feel like that might still encourage people to try to game the system, so I'd propose keeping it simple and making it easy enough to get the green icon that you're not incentivized to spend any time on it.

How many damn emails does this person have? Lmfao

Yup bahahah, I already expected that. Those are rookie numbers - this person is on another level and there are a LOT more to come. I'd love to see how long they waste their life on this.

And this is what I'm talking about lol, see any familiar names?

And now they've started to remove their downvotes. I don't even get it at this point. I'm just gonna go to bed that person's a headache to figure out honestly.

Definitely. The public nature of voting means that it should be possible for anyone to write a bot that spots these patterns automatically.

Whether instance admins do anything about it is a separate matter, but at least everyone will know whether they're doing something about it.

Its concerning that kbin might turn into Reddit with low effort shitposts hitting the front page most of the time because a few people decide to make tons of accounts and boost their posts early on to take advantage of the algorithm. They absolutely are a dork ass loser for ruining what could be a good thing - all for fake internet points, sheesh.

It didn't do anything on reddit either as far as I'm aware, and yet people still went for it like they were trying to get the high score.

"haha I have higher number than you"

This is exactly what some people are after. It lets them believe they are oh so better for having no life outside of the internet. And content quality on kbin suffers in the process.