See here’s the thing - to get the ability to downvote / flag articles, you have to say stuff in public enough times to get the 200 (400?) karma to unlock that. Well, how do you get that karma? You say the things that people on that site want to hear so they click upvote. Spot the curricular bias problem? It was intentionally designed this way.
I remember on stack overflow in order to add a comment with a critical addendum to a question someone else asked, I needed to scrounge around and beg for rep like a second class citizen. Eventually I gave up and posted my addendum as a question with a link to the original, then got in trouble with the mods. I told the mods what the fuck and they added the comment for me under their name. Eventually I earnt enough points to speak; which was then retracted when they increased the minimum rep required to comment again.
I’m not sure there is a better way - all the user moderation approaches I’ve seen involve leaning on the regulars to spot stuff. The alternative is dedicated moderators which tends to lead to it’s own problems. I don’t think you want to rely on those who have just signed up as that would be open to abuse pretty quickly.
You have to manage this carefully. It makes sense to give regulars more power. Take this little community here: You have some power users who have been here for years, who are posting high quality links and high quality posts with many upvotes. It makes sense to give them more upvoting power than some random new account from some new instance. This is something that reddit is struggling with and I suspect Lemmy is too or will be: It’s easy to setup a bot network of a few hundreds or thousands of accounts. They do not need to post, simply up- or downvoting certain topics will help to drown certain stories. The best stories here will gain ~600 upvotes, so just a few hundred accounts will give you the ability to manipulate what is showing up. And favoring older, highly-upvotes accounts is a way to prevent this.
(if you take a look at reddit, you’ll see where this is going: Old account get sold. There are karma-farming bots. Some communities are simply banning new accounts without Karma from posting in order to get the spam in check. Others are invite only)
I always liked old slashdot. The meta moderation system applied to reddit like moderators would be an interesting experiment allowing the community to police the moderators…
He links it at the end, life imitating art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817280
See here’s the thing - to get the ability to downvote / flag articles, you have to say stuff in public enough times to get the 200 (400?) karma to unlock that. Well, how do you get that karma? You say the things that people on that site want to hear so they click upvote. Spot the curricular bias problem? It was intentionally designed this way.
I remember on stack overflow in order to add a comment with a critical addendum to a question someone else asked, I needed to scrounge around and beg for rep like a second class citizen. Eventually I gave up and posted my addendum as a question with a link to the original, then got in trouble with the mods. I told the mods what the fuck and they added the comment for me under their name. Eventually I earnt enough points to speak; which was then retracted when they increased the minimum rep required to comment again.
Made me boycott that website forever
I’m not sure there is a better way - all the user moderation approaches I’ve seen involve leaning on the regulars to spot stuff. The alternative is dedicated moderators which tends to lead to it’s own problems. I don’t think you want to rely on those who have just signed up as that would be open to abuse pretty quickly.
You have to manage this carefully. It makes sense to give regulars more power. Take this little community here: You have some power users who have been here for years, who are posting high quality links and high quality posts with many upvotes. It makes sense to give them more upvoting power than some random new account from some new instance. This is something that reddit is struggling with and I suspect Lemmy is too or will be: It’s easy to setup a bot network of a few hundreds or thousands of accounts. They do not need to post, simply up- or downvoting certain topics will help to drown certain stories. The best stories here will gain ~600 upvotes, so just a few hundred accounts will give you the ability to manipulate what is showing up. And favoring older, highly-upvotes accounts is a way to prevent this.
(if you take a look at reddit, you’ll see where this is going: Old account get sold. There are karma-farming bots. Some communities are simply banning new accounts without Karma from posting in order to get the spam in check. Others are invite only)
I always liked old slashdot. The meta moderation system applied to reddit like moderators would be an interesting experiment allowing the community to police the moderators…
But “want to hear” on HN is sometimes just intelligent or interesting comments, not necessarily bias confirming…