erlend_sh
June 25, 2018, 7:08am
39
I stand by what I’ve said about this in prior discussions:
Based on the anecdotal evidence of having participated in many such communities, I think reputation systems have a high tendency to create an involuntary “I’m better than you”-effect, similar in nature to the “IT’S OVER 9000!-post count”. Think the /r/thebutton experiment - a self-formed class society of “Greys” and “Reds” - without the “we’ll all laugh about this afterwards” roleplay factor. It’s borderline creepy sometimes, the effect a number (compared constantly to other numbers) can have on someone’s psyche.
Yes, these concepts exist on a forum like Discourse as well; post counts are still there, as are trust levels, but they’re hidden by default. They’re played down, not up, and that makes a big difference. Discourse distinguishes between “Member” and “Regular”, but it doesn’t distinguish between RegularUserX and RegularUserY, which is the point where you may start to value your worth as a community member based on an arbitrary number that’s inflated by behaviour that doesn’t necessarily benefit the community as a whole.
I’ve yet to see a large scale reputation system, on the internet or elsewhere, that successfully incentivises healthy community dynamics – which is probably why they always face ridicule in pop entertainment.
And the very real-life applications of such systems are downright terrifying.
The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of the People's Republic of China. The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. There are multiple forms of the social credit system being experimented with, while the national regulatory method is The origin of ...
More often than not such systems only help to amplify innate human flaws, such as us/them thinking.
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/why-your-brain-hates-other-people-rp
The fact that our badge system could still use some improvements is not a good reason to implement a new system with a very bad track record. I tend to agree with you when it comes to our “First X” badges. I’ve always been of the opinion that Discourse should focus much more on human-awarded badges rather than algorithmic ones .
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