More comment clutter. Platforms like Reddit, HN, Slashdot, Lemmy, Kbin etc. have an issue called fluff principle (TL;DR: “fluff” content is voted over actual content), and now they’re introducing yet another way to make fluff more visible than the content.
Ahead of us starting to roll this out on October 26th, you will find a new “Collectible Expressions” toggle under the “Media in Comments” section in your Mod Tools.
Reddit Inc. is internally fragmented, isn’t it? Like, from an outside PoV they were treating the mods like shit, and now they’re giving the mods the ability to opt out some feature? While killing older features that were similar in spirit to the one being introduced, delivering the message “you shouldn’t give this a fuck, because it’ll go away”?
The comments are the best part of this. Here are a few of them:
[+89] “Honestly ridiculous.”
[+68] “I’d rather you do something about the relentless spam bots instead, not this garbage”
[+45] “Dumpster Fire Collectible Expression is rather appropriate for this.”
[+20, same comment chain as above] “/all has been filled with so many bots accounts since the third party wipe, its embarrassing”
[+55] “I appreciate your effort, but what’s the point of this?”
[-46, OP, replying to the above] “The goal is to give redditors another avenue for self expression. It is only enabled on communities that already use media in comments (i.e. GIFs, images, etc) (and can be disabled!) to ensure that it’s inline with the community’s culture.”
[+30, replying to the above] “This is incorrect. It’s was enabled in all 3 communities I moderate, none of which have any media in comments options enabled.”
Back in the Elder Days, I had a four digit user id on slashdot. Slashdot was the first social media site that I had seen that implemented a karma system. At some point within the first few years (iirc), they capped karma at +5 per post.
I decided to try an experiment where I’d see how much karma farming I could do, and simply started making pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft posts multiple times a day. As someone exclusively using Linux (this was probably around 1996-1997) and who hated MS, this wasn’t a big stretch. I got a massive amount of karma in a very short time with intentionally fluff posts, which forever changed how I’d look at social media.
Now the posts I enjoy writing are mostly long form ones, of which I actually hit post on less than half. I easily get pages into a post before deciding I just don’t care about it all that much and just don’t bother submitting it.
There’s several things social media sites could do in order to cut down on fluff and encourage more engaging posts, but it means walking away from the easy karma models.
I easily get pages into a post before deciding I just don’t care about it all that much and just don’t bother submitting it.
I do the exact same thing - writing a wall of text, just to close the window and never submit it!
There’s several things social media sites could do in order to cut down on fluff and encourage more engaging posts, but it means walking away from the easy karma models.
Fully agree with this. And Slashdot itself did a few things right in this direction, like the +5 karma/post limit that you mentioned or acknowledging that people upvote things for different reasons (funny, insightful, etc.). It’s just that certain businesses like Reddit don’t really care about quality of the experience of its users - they care about ad views per second.
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