How would you like XP, voting and vote sorts to be managed? (and anything else you want to suggest)

My two cents:

XP was recently explained to me as an attempt to game-ify phuks, hence why it's a mish-mash of up/downvotes and badges.

If you're going to make phuks a game, then make sure your measure of success corresponds to what you think makes a successful website.

I politely suggest that up minus downvote based measures that don't decay over time, attract power-mad unemployed karma-whores and encourage vote manipulation and alts.

I would like to see phuks as a large active community of everyday people who regularly interact with each other. As such, if I was going to make a score to measure site contribution it would be something like: At a particular time each day, check whether a user has both voted and either posted or commented within the last 48 hours. If they have, add a point to their score. If they haven't voted in the last week, subtract a point from their score. So you "win" by regularly taking part - which I think is all you need to build community.

Regarding your "voting" section above that tries to detect alts and prevent brigading: I think it's too hard. You might catch some really obvious activity. You'll never catch them or even know if the smart ones are out there. You definitely don't want to be banning sincere users, so you should be competent and statistically confident before acting - I assume you don't have time to write PhDs on this.

If shit really hits the fan in future: eg Voat dies, the refugees invade, your site becomes a stranger, and you need to start restricting users "speaking" rights. Either restrict everyone, or restrict based on a score like mine above - that has nothing to do with "what" people say, but is based simply on their historical website patronage.

@Polsaker @pembo210

[–] Polsaker 1 points (+1|-0)

I politely suggest that up minus downvote based measures that don't decay over time, attract power-mad unemployed karma-whores and encourage vote manipulation and alts. I would like to see phuks as a large active community of everyday people who regularly interact with each other. As such, if I was going to make a score to measure site contribution it would be something like: At a particular time each day, check whether a user has both voted and either posted or commented within the last 48 hours. If they have, add a point to their score. If they haven't voted in the last week, subtract a point from their score. So you "win" by regularly taking part - which I think is all you need to build community.

Well, if we're going to be pessimistic, having people comment and vote every two days would result in a lot of "roflolo", "lol that was funny", "hahahaha", "hi, today i scratched my anus and it felt good, am i gay?", etc posts/comments.

But if we go that way, what about reducing the value of up/downvotes on the level counter? For example, if an upvote is 1XP, then a comment would be 4XP and a post 8XP or something like that.

[–] smallpond 1 points (+1|-0)

I don't consider that to be a lot of "roflolo". The most shameless power-mad level-whore should only be logging in once every 1.9 days, saying "roflolo" once and downvoting something. Anything more and they're just wasting time. If they really did this, their XP/CCP/popularity score would stagnate and the manner of their level-whoring would at least be transparent from their post/comment history. (I still welcome reporting other statistics on accounts - after all, popularity matters to many, including egomaniacs.) Even someone who solely wants to build 'my' score is still forced to look at the website, decide where to speak, and resist the urge to engage - it takes dedication to be consistently meaningless.

Less pessimistically, I think the vast majority of people would discuss or post something they give a crap about, as they do now, or at worst post a pic of a cute cat, or something on SDBH. There's no real penalty if they don't say anything anyway. Just a slow decay when people stop using the site altogether for serious periods of time, because I don't think you want a ton of powered-up sleeper accounts sitting around.

But if we go that way, what about reducing the value of up/downvotes on the level counter? For example, if an upvote is 1XP, then a comment would be 4XP and a post 8XP or something like that.

Up and downvotes naturally have a ton of power on a reddit-like forum by regulating content visibility - I see no need to include them as part of the overall level counter at all. No offence, but your suggestion above strikes me as a more efficient way to flood the site with low-effort/meaningless/insincere (but not too offensive) content. Ask people to say just one thing, and I think they're more likely to do it well.

While I think reducing the power of up/downvotes should help, alts could still be a problem, and you could argue that asking so little of each account means it's easy to maintain many alts if you want to have a disproportionate influence on apparent site consensus. If necessary in future, I was pondering including a captcha at login, with an automatic account log-out after a few hours. This would be annoying, but at least it would be 10 times more annoying for someone with 10 alts. Really, I think there's currently no way to prevent alts while preserving user anonymity.

For me people make the website. I like seeing everyone's point of view, but too much of anyone's point of view is almost always bad. I don't think you can exaggerate community by encouraging people to post/comment in excess. Accordingly, I like a score that encourages people to speak up regularly, but gives no extra credit for hogging the microphone.

I don't consider that to be _a lot_ of "roflolo". The most shameless power-mad level-whore should only be logging in once every 1.9 days, saying "roflolo" once and downvoting something. Anything more and they're just wasting time. If they really did this, their XP/CCP/popularity score would stagnate and the manner of their level-whoring would at least be transparent from their post/comment history. (I still welcome _reporting_ other statistics on accounts - after all, popularity matters to many, including egomaniacs.) Even someone who solely wants to build 'my' score is still forced to look at the website, decide where to speak, and resist the urge to engage - it takes dedication to be consistently meaningless. Less pessimistically, I think the vast majority of people would discuss or post something they give a crap about, as they do now, or at worst post a pic of a cute cat, or something on SDBH. There's no real penalty if they don't say anything anyway. Just a slow decay when people stop using the site altogether for serious periods of time, because I don't think you want a ton of powered-up sleeper accounts sitting around. > But if we go that way, what about reducing the value of up/downvotes on the level counter? For example, if an upvote is 1XP, then a comment would be 4XP and a post 8XP or something like that. Up and downvotes naturally have a ton of power on a reddit-like forum by regulating content visibility - I see no need to include them as part of the overall level counter at all. No offence, but your suggestion above strikes me as a more efficient way to flood the site with low-effort/meaningless/insincere (but not *too* offensive) content. Ask people to say just one thing, and I think they're more likely to do it well. While I think reducing the power of up/downvotes should help, alts could still be a problem, and you could argue that asking so little of each account means it's easy to maintain many alts if you want to have a disproportionate influence on apparent site consensus. If necessary in future, I was pondering including a captcha at login, with an automatic account log-out after a few hours. This would be annoying, but at least it would be 10 times more annoying for someone with 10 alts. Really, I think there's currently no way to prevent alts while preserving user anonymity. For me people make the website. I like seeing everyone's point of view, but too much of anyone's point of view is almost always bad. I don't think you can exaggerate community by encouraging people to post/comment in excess. Accordingly, I like a score that encourages people to speak up regularly, but gives no extra credit for hogging the microphone.

[–] Polsaker 1 points (+1|-0)

I got your point, I posted this in our issue tracker so I can see it when we start working again on user profiles (we're currently busy trying to make the dev site... usable).

I was also going to talk about how your system could be easily abused with alts, but it's worse with the current one :p

I still welcome reporting other statistics on accounts - after all, popularity matters to many, including egomaniacs. Of course we should report total comment/post score as a big number below the level. After all, I would get scared if my e-penis got smaller by removing that sweet sweet number.

[–] InnocentBystander 2 points (+2|-0)

I am not in favour of applying any comment or posting restrictions based on XP or account age like Voat did, and I suspect that others will agree.

Agreed. An initial validation period to screw with the spammers and sock-puppets, is helpful. But once past that, I do not feel that there should be any differences in capability between a level 5 and a level 50, other than meaningless cosmetics (badges, xp, etc).

..Looking at this information in conjunction with, it will be possible to pinpoint alt account groups.

That sounds like a good tactic that will work for a bit. But if there's one thing I've learned from the spammers and agenda pushers, it's that they adapt quickly. So nothing is a permanent solution.

I think it will ultimately be unnecessary because it will happen so infrequently. Transparency is important though, so perhaps we could add a flair to affected posts that show the original vote count.

I also think that should be unnecessary. It should happen so seldom that a piece of flair would be enough. If it starts happening enough for people to want a closer look, then there's bigger problems that need to be dealt with.

[–] PMYA [OP] 2 points (+2|-0)

That sounds like a good tactic that will work for a bit. But if there's one thing I've learned from the spammers and agenda pushers, it's that they adapt quickly. So nothing is a permanent solution.

This is true, but I think it will be effective even if people try and get around it. For example, you could space out the downvotes over a period of time to try and avoid detection, but by the time you do that, the post has already been upvoted enough for it to be seen, meaning you can't completely bury something straight away. We could add something to look at accounts that consistently downvote the same person, then look at account creation date and vote times to find the alts. By displaying the data in a way that makes it easy to extract the information, we can see things happening and adapt it to show new tactics that brigaders are using. I think the goal is not to completely stop it, but to make it far more time consuming to brigade than it takes for us to find them.

Giving mods access to the voting data without the usernames attached will mean that mods can request for something to be looked at by the admins, then they can look at all of the account information to see whats going on. Crowdsourced brigade detection, in a way.

How would you like XP, voting and vote sorts to be managed? (and anything else you want to suggest)

XP

Voting

Vote Sorts

6 comments

/s/AskPhuks