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Misuse of the Karma system

Penta Penguin·4/21/2016, 9:07:56 PM·5 votes·555 views

tl;dr - The Boards seriously don't understand upvoting and downvoting

On Reddit and on here, the intent of upvotes and downvotes is supposed to be a measure of contribution to discussion. Your vote is not meant to be 'agree' or 'disagree', that is what your post is supposed to be for.

Did that guy rationally state his opinion or give facts about the thread topic, is there effort in their post? Upvote it. Did they just post "no you're wrong"? Downvote it!

It does you no service to downvote legitimate posts just because you disagree with them (or even upvote only because you agree). It stifles real discussions in favor of popular tripe, where posts like "gut zed" rise to the top as 'shining' example of our community, and the front page is spammed with the same thread over and over again.

Forums are supposed to be about discussion but right now the Boards feel like a broken record of shallow ideas and funny cat pictures.

2 Comments

Wolfess4/22/2016, 7:52:42 AM1 votes

the Karma system is borderline worthless here. The community, boards included, is filled with too many trolls, too many people posting things for the lulz, and many biased opinions from a favoritism point of view and also a this-game-is-annoyingly-difficult-to-balance point of view.

even if the karma system was meant to be used differently from what boards actually uses it currently, it still has become a I like/agree and i don't like/disagree system since it (I believe) affects the hot/best form of sorting and probably other sorting methods as well for visibility since most people don't go past what's seen in the first page and don't bother hitting the "show more" button, or at least not hitting it more than once. They probably have it like that to try to reduce necroing since hitting the button discourages looking back too far.

BeeCuz4/22/2016, 8:24:27 AM1 votes

That's what is called an opinion, and it may have even been the original intent when the system was conceived and created. But as has been noted by this post, that definition/assertion is not an accurate representation of it's use.

So the next step to a curious mind is: What purpose does it actually serve, and how can we elaborate and serve that purpose?