No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
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Yes.
What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.
The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.
By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.
Personally, I consider my comment being upvoted the incentive. I don't care about the running total.
It was key to the early days of Reddit's success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
That is a really good point, and I'm on the same page with you as far as reposting where credit is given. What I'm referring to on the concept of reposts is more akin to something posted by an originating author, which is neglected or ignored, until a high karma user simply reposts it and an engagement algorithm is tuned to float it in the feed based on karma and individual user-influence. The end result is that original content gets discouraged in lieu of limited gatekeepers of the "hive mind" nature of deigning what's "popular" vs the quality of content sorted by non-karma based metrics, if that makes sense.
To put it another way, it's just my personal preference after seeing the sheer amount of low effort karma farmers that recycle unoriginal content recently posted who are able to float posts to the top, as opposed to truly original or engaging ideas being encouraged.
That's for me at least why I'm so turned off to the idea of a user-centric reputation model as opposed to the content quality metrics, that being the individual upvote and downvote trends for each post. There won't ever be a perfect system, and I'm sure there will be reasons to attack that notion later.
I see. Thank you for clarifying, I'll need to consider this further.
You're a really pleasant person, and I'm also rethinking, it's such a mixed bag of a concept as to what's "better". Maybe what really matters is the overall oversight of the instance hosts and style of administration for these micro-communities. I really do appreciate the tone of discussion here and have to check myself as people here don't need to wear the "battle gloves" as it were.
Thank you. I do try to be pleasant in online spaces. I find it helps me stand out sometimes.
And yes, actually, I've come to your same conclusion. I cannot deny that there are some legitimate criticisms of the karma system, and while I personally think that people are exaggerating the negatives, and blaming some human-nature style flaws on karma specifically when they'd happen anyway without it, I am no longer certain on which option is healthier in the long-run. I agree that leaving it up to the smaller communities is probably ideal.