Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:

  • Upvotes & Downvotes function akin to Reddit
  • Boosts count as two Upvotes (link)
  • Favorites are added to https://kbin.social/fav if you Upvote (link)
  • Reputation Points have been updated

In addition to that, Ernest stated that “there is no connection between reputation points and sorting algorithms. It’s just info in the profile” (link)

  • nefarious@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

    I think Goodhart’s law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn’t require you to make quality contributions.