I've said it before, I don't think posts (or users) should have a number associated to them. It promotes karma whoring. And I don't say that in an accusatory way -- I watch the upvote counts with excitement when I submit a post too. It's just human nature.
If a post was rated "Very unpopular", "Somewhat unpopular", "Neutral", "Somewhat popular" and "Very popular" then you could still identify the hot posts but without engaging the reward/addictive centre of the brain.
Same with users. Don't give them an endlessly growing "karma" number that encourages spamming low quality populist posts. Once they hit "Very popular" there's no more incentive to make submissions purely for the seratonin fix.
yeah I find myself being influenced by post or comment scores even though I don't want to be/know I shouldn't be
I wish I could look at a +20 comment and a -20 comment with the same objectivity
and as you said it creates score chasers, which I think is kind of an addiction. like they gotta get/keep the high score on a game leaderboard which just leads to the types of posts or comments that are 'most efficient' in gaining said scores
Maybe posts and stuff could just have a temperature (since we already use "Hot" lol).
If the responses are mostly +1, the post is initially Warm, and eventually just Hot. If the votes are mostly -1, then it's Cool or Cold. I'm not sure how fine-grained this needs to be, but maybe 5 steps good enough. Hot warm room-temp cool cold lol.
I definitely don't need to chase dopamine points, but I do appreciate knowing the community response to stuf. And it's fine to keep the exact number of up or down votes public, just put it under the Activity page under More, I just don't need it front and centre.
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