I’m a little confused about how the upvote/downvote system works as related to your reputation on KBin. Can someone explain?
Upvotes don’t do anything for personal points. Boost gives plus points, downvotes give negative points. If I like a post I upvote and boost it.
So wait then it’s way easier to get down votes than upvotes and get a bad reputation?
Yes, but you can boost your own comments to counteract the downvotes. The whole system is sketchy at best and shouldn’t be relied on to determine anything about a user.
oof, I don’t like how that is at all. Is this by design or will that change ever?
The upvote button on kbin was originally mapped to boosts. People didn’t care for they, and it was incongruent with how Lemmy does it. So, they changed the functionality, but didn’t get around to updating the rest of the reputation system.
That said, kbin doesn’t federated down votes, so the system is going to be weird no matter what.
I hope they remove the reputation display, people farming karma points was stupid.
Up/down votes should be used for post/comment organising and nothing more imo.
It has downsides, but it can be revealing. For example most users have a pretty average reputation, around -5 to 10 points, since it’s easier to lose reputation than to gain it. But there’s two week old accounts walking around with -2500 reputation, which says a lot.
I would prefer a system akin to old forums. Posts are worth X experience points(or whatever you want to call it) based on word count(and possibly some other factors). Maybe aside from ranking the page/comments, votes could also be used to determine how good at “promoting discussion” the post was. Upvote if the post promotes discussion(even if you disagree with it), and downvote if it’s just trolling gibberish nonsense. Then use the upvote/downvote ratio to determine how much of the experience points are gained or lost from the person’s reputation.
So for example, say a certain post was worth 100 exp based on its specific word count. And it has a 78% “this was good discussion” upvote ratio. The user would gain 78 exp. Longer, but well thought out and not spammy posts would in theory rise to the top while still rewarding shorter posts as well and discouraging quick spammy stuff.
This would of course require votes to return to “this does/doesn’t promote quality discussion” vs “I like/agree with this”.
Thank you for asking this. I was confused, and honestly, too afraid to ask. This whole thread cleared up that mess. Not saying I want to Karma farm, and I’d be perfectly happy without a reputation system, but it feels bad to be in the negatives when it does exist.
It is kind of odd.
You can also boost your own comments if the negative bothers you. It‘s pretty meaningless anyway as afaik it‘s not used like in Reddit to lock people out or anything.