I think mob rule as a moderation system is bad, and having a few power-users in charge is not the worst answer to that.

In my head: you’d have small web of trusts (I can vouch for you, you can vouch your friend, your friend can vouch for me, I must be somewhat trustworthy), and these webs would have some kind of voting power over flagged comments. Of course, that can be gamed…

Is this for an online community like Lemmy, or more oriented towards fixing the credit institutions?

in any case, a credibility metric would soon turn into a goal to achieve ^(karmafarming says what?)^

A metric ceases to be useful when it becomes a goal.

Just disregard ‘votes’ entirely. What exactly are you hoping to achieve? Do you want “low-credibility” users highlighted in red so you don’t have to bother reading their comments? Have them hidden entirely? Seems like existing tools like blocking and banning already accomplish these goals.

Most people (including myself) would like to agree with you on building some sort of system to create credibility or honesty or reliability among people on a social media platform. I think the majority of people that use any social media (including Lemmy) would probably agree and more than likely would participate in it.

Unfortunately, it only takes a small group of people to upset the system, game the system, play with the system or create situations or systems of their own to manipulate everything … either to fight against others, or to generate some sort of power or control of their own. All it would take is this small group to completely change everything and make everything difficult and non functional.

It’s a lot like the democratic system of government. When you think about it the majority of everyone would like to participate in it and make it work … unfortunately, its only a small group of powerful individuals who have gamed the system to give themselves and their friends power over everyone else.

Why do we need to know how many up or down votes a user has? Assholes usually make themselves known pretty quickly.

I love the concept, but the ugly reality is that anyone can spin up an instance and pour in an arbitrary number of votes to themselves or anyone else. I think the credibility score would give people a false confidence and honestly do more harm than good unfortunately

The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.

your attempt at convincing people why to use a button will fail. they will do what they want. technical solutions for human behaviors can be difficult because humans do not generally like to be told what to do

mbin already has ‘reputation’ exposed

While I would never support it, the main way to improve online discussion is by removing anonymity. Allow me to go back a couple decades and point to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with a reasonable expectation of anonymity turn into complete assholes. The common solution to this is by linking accounts to a real identity in some way, such that online actions have negative consequences to the person taking them. Google famously tried this by forcing people to use their real name on accounts. And it was a privacy nightmare. Ultimately though, it’s the only functional solution. If anti-social actions do not have negative social consequences, then there is no disincentive for people to not take those actions and people can just keep spinning up new accounts and taking those same anti-social actions. This can also be automated, resulting in the bot farms which troll and brigade online forums. On the privacy nightmare side of the coin, it means it’s much easier to target people for legitimate, though unpopular, opinions. There are some “in the middle” options, which can make the cost to creating accounts somewhat higher and slower; but, which don’t expose peoples’ real identities in quite the same way. But, every system has it’s pros and cons. And the linking of identities to accounts

Voting systems and the like will always be a kludge, which is easy to work around. Any attempt to predicate the voting on trusting users to “do the right thing” is doomed to fail. People suck, they will do what they want and ignore the rules when they feel they are justified in doing so. Or, some people will do it just to be dicks. At the same time, it also promotes herding and bubbles. If everyone in a community chooses to downvote puppies and upvote cats, eventually the puppy people will be drown out and forced to go off and found their own community which does the opposite. And those communities, both now stuck in a bias reinforcing echo chamber, will continue to drift further apart and possibly radicalize against each other. This isn’t even limited to online discussions. People often choose their meat-space friends based on similar beliefs, which leads to people living in bubbles which may not be representative to a wider world.

Despite the limitations of the kludge, I do think voting systems are the best we’re going to get. I’d agree with @grue that the Slashdot system had a lot of merit. Allowing the community to both vote on articles/comments and then later have those votes voted on by a random selection of users, seems like a reasonable way to try to enforce some of the “good faith” voting you’re looking for. Though, even that will likely get gamed and lead to herding. It’s also a lot more cumbersome and relies on the user community taking on a greater role in maintaining the community. But, as I have implied, I don’t think there is a “good” solution, only a lot of “less bad” ones.

One issue specific to the Fediverse is that each instance and each community might have its own standard for what it considers “credible”—and part of another user’s credibility score might come from users on instances with which yours isn’t federated and doesn’t share information.

You know that the current voting system isn’t like/dislike, right? Or it’s not supposed to be. Your proposed system would have the same problem: users would use it as like / dislike buttons.

You’d need to limit the capacity to vote on credibility to people who are members of the community. If you haven’t joined, you can’t make a judgment about what is or isn’t a good faith post, but your own post can be voted by members. Rather than being attached to just the user, it would probably be better if it were referenced to the user per community. Even so, it’s essentially karma, and could probably be gamed.

Otherwise, you’ve just reinvented upvotes.

Thank you all for the discussion! I have read all the comments and enjoyed each response and will continue to do so. I came out with pretty much the same feelings as the rest of you…. In an ideal world…

Once again, thank you and good luck to everyone out there…we got this!

I award you 2 MeowMeowBeenz

Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.

That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:

• You need site (or community) staff, who are not constrained by reputation limits, to police the system
• Upvoting is disabled until you have at least a little reputation
• Downvoting is disabled until you have a decent amount of reputation and costs you reputation
• Upvotes grant more reputation than downvotes take away
• Voting fraud is a bannable offense and there are methods in place to detect it
• The system is designed to discourage reuse of content
• Not all activities can be upvoted or downvoted. For example, commenting on SO requires a minimum amount of reputation, but unless they’re reported as spam, offensive, fraudulent, etc. (which also requires a minimum reputation), they don’t impact your reputation, even if upvoted.

If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.

You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.

Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.

Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to <other server> at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.