While I would never support it, the main way to improve online discussion is by removing anonymity. Allow me to go back a couple decades and point to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with a reasonable expectation of anonymity turn into complete assholes. The common solution to this is by linking accounts to a real identity in some way, such that online actions have negative consequences to the person taking them. Google famously tried this by forcing people to use their real name on accounts. And it was a privacy nightmare. Ultimately though, it’s the only functional solution. If anti-social actions do not have negative social consequences, then there is no disincentive for people to not take those actions and people can just keep spinning up new accounts and taking those same anti-social actions. This can also be automated, resulting in the bot farms which troll and brigade online forums. On the privacy nightmare side of the coin, it means it’s much easier to target people for legitimate, though unpopular, opinions. There are some “in the middle” options, which can make the cost to creating accounts somewhat higher and slower; but, which don’t expose peoples’ real identities in quite the same way. But, every system has it’s pros and cons. And the linking of identities to accounts

Voting systems and the like will always be a kludge, which is easy to work around. Any attempt to predicate the voting on trusting users to “do the right thing” is doomed to fail. People suck, they will do what they want and ignore the rules when they feel they are justified in doing so. Or, some people will do it just to be dicks. At the same time, it also promotes herding and bubbles. If everyone in a community chooses to downvote puppies and upvote cats, eventually the puppy people will be drown out and forced to go off and found their own community which does the opposite. And those communities, both now stuck in a bias reinforcing echo chamber, will continue to drift further apart and possibly radicalize against each other. This isn’t even limited to online discussions. People often choose their meat-space friends based on similar beliefs, which leads to people living in bubbles which may not be representative to a wider world.

Despite the limitations of the kludge, I do think voting systems are the best we’re going to get. I’d agree with @grue that the Slashdot system had a lot of merit. Allowing the community to both vote on articles/comments and then later have those votes voted on by a random selection of users, seems like a reasonable way to try to enforce some of the “good faith” voting you’re looking for. Though, even that will likely get gamed and lead to herding. It’s also a lot more cumbersome and relies on the user community taking on a greater role in maintaining the community. But, as I have implied, I don’t think there is a “good” solution, only a lot of “less bad” ones.

Just disregard ‘votes’ entirely. What exactly are you hoping to achieve? Do you want “low-credibility” users highlighted in red so you don’t have to bother reading their comments? Have them hidden entirely? Seems like existing tools like blocking and banning already accomplish these goals.

You know that the current voting system isn’t like/dislike, right? Or it’s not supposed to be. Your proposed system would have the same problem: users would use it as like / dislike buttons.

I award you 2 MeowMeowBeenz

I think mob rule as a moderation system is bad, and having a few power-users in charge is not the worst answer to that.

In my head: you’d have small web of trusts (I can vouch for you, you can vouch your friend, your friend can vouch for me, I must be somewhat trustworthy), and these webs would have some kind of voting power over flagged comments. Of course, that can be gamed…

I think we should take another look at Slashdot’s moderation and meta-moderation system:

• Users couldn’t just vote on everything; “modpoints” (upvotes/downvotes, but also with a reason attached) were a limited resource.
• Comments scores were bounded to [-1, 5] instead of being unbounded.
• Most importantly, what wasn’t limited was that users had the opportunity to “meta-moderate:” they would be shown a set of moderation actions and be asked to give a 👍 or 👎 based on whether they agreed with the modpoint usage or not.
• Users would be awarded modpoints based on their karma (how their own comments had been modded by others) and their judgement (whether people agreed or not with their modpoint usage).

Admittedly the exact formula Slashdot used for awarding modpoints was secret to prevent people from gaming it, which doesn’t exactly work for Lemmy, but the point is that I think the idea of using more than one kind of signal to determine reputation is a good one.

I think the practical result would be the same as any existing upvote/downvote system, because people don’t objectively evaluate content for being well researched or thought out or expressed in good faith, they upvote what they like or agree with and downvote what they don’t. They’re going to do that no matter what you tell them to do.

People will vote for what they like, not what’s good faith.

Is this for an online community like Lemmy, or more oriented towards fixing the credit institutions?

in any case, a credibility metric would soon turn into a goal to achieve ^(karmafarming says what?)^

A metric ceases to be useful when it becomes a goal.

I love the concept, but the ugly reality is that anyone can spin up an instance and pour in an arbitrary number of votes to themselves or anyone else. I think the credibility score would give people a false confidence and honestly do more harm than good unfortunately

your attempt at convincing people why to use a button will fail. they will do what they want. technical solutions for human behaviors can be difficult because humans do not generally like to be told what to do

mbin already has ‘reputation’ exposed

There was a great DefCon talk recently about how a guy gained credibility on the dark web over the course of a few years and it was easy to do by just being helpful to others. People tend to trust those who are helpful.

After awhile, he got busted and the feds took over his ToR identity and used his credibility to bust some criminals on the dark web.

I recommend being suspicious of everyone you interact with online.

Most people (including myself) would like to agree with you on building some sort of system to create credibility or honesty or reliability among people on a social media platform. I think the majority of people that use any social media (including Lemmy) would probably agree and more than likely would participate in it.

Unfortunately, it only takes a small group of people to upset the system, game the system, play with the system or create situations or systems of their own to manipulate everything … either to fight against others, or to generate some sort of power or control of their own. All it would take is this small group to completely change everything and make everything difficult and non functional.

It’s a lot like the democratic system of government. When you think about it the majority of everyone would like to participate in it and make it work … unfortunately, its only a small group of powerful individuals who have gamed the system to give themselves and their friends power over everyone else.

You’d need to limit the capacity to vote on credibility to people who are members of the community. If you haven’t joined, you can’t make a judgment about what is or isn’t a good faith post, but your own post can be voted by members. Rather than being attached to just the user, it would probably be better if it were referenced to the user per community. Even so, it’s essentially karma, and could probably be gamed.

Otherwise, you’ve just reinvented upvotes.

The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.