Would limiting Politics, NSFW, NSFL and downvotes content to users with only 500+ comment karma be good?
Posted by busymom0@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 21 comments
One of the biggest problem I have seen on almost all alternatives including the new ones is that they all become dominated with political content. Would the following ideas be appreciated by users?
All posts and comments must be marked with a flair if they are:
- Politics
- NSFW (nudity/porn)
- NSFL (things like rage bait, gore, death, name calling, involves discussion of immutable characteristics etc)
- Regulated (discussion about weapons, guns, drugs like weed, psychedelics etc)
- Bot (approved bots similar to bots on Reddit like RemindMe)
Only users with certain amount of post karma and comment karma will be permitted to post such content. Let's say 500 post karma and 500 comment karma.
By default, such content will also be hidden from users who are not signed in as well as all users unless they enable such content in their settings.
Posts will only have upvotes and no downvotes. Comments will have both upvotes and downvotes but ability to downvote will be restricted to accounts with minimum 500 post and 500 comment karma.
A comment can be downvoted but only up to -4 will count towards the user in order to prevent hive mind.
Downvote will also result in -2 points on the person downvoting too.
Moderation will be done by users who have 500 post karma and 500 comment karma. Such moderation logs will be public. This moderation will involve ability to change the above flairs (nsfw, nsfl, political etc) on posts which are not correctly flaired.
What do you all think of these ideas? Are some of them good or bad or can be improved?
Note that some of the ideas are my own while others I have learnt from other sites like hacker news and lobsters.
Thomas_359_@reddit
What do I put if my post talks about the Israel-Palestine conflict but it's not the main point of the story?
busymom0@reddit (OP)
That would still need to be flared as Politics.
Thomas_359_@reddit
What if there is no flair for politics?
MigrateOutOfReddit@reddit
Flairs: decent idea.
Restricting participation based on karma: bad idea. Alternatives often struggle to gather some content rolling, and you're further restricting who can contribute with it. Also, I don't think that karma is a good feature to begin with.
Downvotes only in comments, not posts: it seems like an arbitrary restriction. If downvotes make a platform better or worse, it should apply to both comments and posts, I think.
Limited negative score from downvotes: this also looks like a bad idea because the main purpose of downvotes is to shove down non-contributive content out of the way, and they do a decent (not perfect) job at that. If you're limiting its main purpose, might as well remove the feature altogether.
Downvotes "costing" something to the downvoter: this idea is IMO worth thinking about.
Everyone is a mod past a certain "mechanical" barrier (i.e. karma): bad idea. Too easy to abuse.
Sorry if I sound pessimistic but I'd rather be honest in what I think.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
The reason is that if a post is bad, user can comment or not engage. But if a comment is bad, it doesn't need engagement and just needs a downvote.
But I understand it can come across as arbitrary.
I think you misunderstood my idea. The score is limited only for the user getting the downvote. The comment itself can still be downvoted. Like if a comment gets downvoted to -100, the user will only get -4 on his particular account. This is to prevent a single comment resulting in the drainage of all of user's points (since the ideas are heavily reliant on user points).
No need to be sorry at all. I made the post in order to get feedback and that's what you did perfectly.
MigrateOutOfReddit@reddit
I misunderstood it indeed - my bad. Limiting it only for the user seems sensible.
keepthepace@reddit
Moderating politics, NSFWL, regulated content, etc. is not inherently good or bad, it is an editorial policy that create different communities. When /r/france made a month without politics (which is usually 50+% of its content), many people were angry, many people loved it.
Some people want to talk about politics, they need communities that do. Some people want to talk about pokemon, they need communities that do.
My guts tell me that this is trying to solve a non existent problem, while giving ways for trolls to do more damage but I don't have the hard data to prove it, so that's worth trying.
I like the idea of downvoting costing something too.
That will lead to a community managed by the most frequent posters, less casual, and with the potential to go into toxic direction once a few trolls sync with each other. You have to be careful and consider a brigade of malicious users. What does moderation powers encompass? You will probably still need super-moderators to limit the warfare abilities of trolls who may want otherwise to kick/ban 90% of the users or just to target the moderators active against them.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
So I could have all users start with 100 karma and for every downvote on a post, it can subtract 1 point and on every downvote on a comment, it can subtract 2 points. How's that?
keepthepace@reddit
I don't see why you would start with a positive karma. Not being able to downvote for a while is not a huge problem to participate.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
Fair point.
No_Industry9653@reddit
Your idea seems to rely on a high level of civic mindedness and good faith contribution of your userbase, it would be abused and malfunction without that. Lots of people use votes only as an agree/disagree button to advance the causes they care about and nothing else, don't care about quality of discussion, and aren't looking to contribute anything, so asking them to act effectively as a decentralized content labeling and moderation system will be a tough sell.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
I understand what you are saying. However, isn't the "NSFW" flair on Reddit kind of based on good faith too and seems to be obeyed pretty well by people despite other flaws of reddit?
Beatnik77@reddit
It would make the political talk even more of an echo chamber and also make karma way too important.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
Any other suggestions to prevent political talk not dominate the entire website?
eccsoheccsseven@reddit
You put name calling in the same category as NSFL? WTF.
But I do agree on weighting downvotes more. I've done that with my polling. See here: https://goatmatrix.net/c/MatrixEvents/BNd4vrKVqd
The downside is that negative scores on things look.. negative.
Although posts a different creature. Downvotes on new posts are too powerful on most of these sites IMO because it allows a few actors to censor anything they don't like. So unless you've done something unique with your sort alg making strong downvotes possible on new posts is a mistake.
busymom0@reddit (OP)
It's an idea but it could be called something else instead too.
How about a logarithmic algorithm where the first few downvotes don't have as much weight as the later ones:
Kind of the reverse of "hotness" score used by reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cjlp6/eli5_how_does_reddit_determine_what_is_on_the_hot/
kdjfsk@reddit
post/comment karma is not a good metric, as it is easily faked, no matter where you put the number. also, toxic people support each other, so even you could detect artificial stat padding, the same person can get to whatever number you set by simply being a populist.
democracy is not what you think it is. see: mob rule, see: recent election results.
Monsieur_Moneybags@reddit
I think these are all terrible ideas. As others have noted, it will make karma whoring even worse than it already is. But the bigger problem is your insistence on regulating free speech. Besides things like death threats, doxxing and spam, everything should be fair game for discussion.
So many redditors don't have the ability to simply ignore unpopular or "incorrect" opinions—they instead insist on punishing users with those opinions. That's anti-social behavior, which this platform encourages by allowing downvotes and bans for opinions. Where does this authoritarian desire to control speech come from?
bolivar-shagnasty@reddit
I made two of the subs I mod have karma restrictions. It’s cut down on bots and off topic nonsense dramatically.
I get an automod notification that there are posts in the queue waiting for approval.
If the post is relevant, I approve it. If not, or it’s an obvious bot post, in the queue it stays.
I also have an IFTTT account and get realtime updates whenever new posts appear on my small public subs.
Gearjerk@reddit
I like the spirit of your suggestions. The single largest flaw in my eyes is that by locking certain elements based on karma, you make karma itself have value. This in turn will encourage karma farming, diluting the quality of content posted, and crucially, undermining the entire purpose of the karma threshold system.
Also, while I understand the idea behind making downvotes "cost" more (or removing them entirely), don't forget that downvotes serve an important role in user-sourced management of spam and other irrelevant content. Handicapping this mechanism means you'll need to compensate elsewhere.
If you want to go the "all users over X karma are mods" route, you might need to tie it into the "users subscribe to mods" concept to prevent absolute pandemonium.
abudhabikid@reddit
Ok, stack exchange