Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.
Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay.
Background
Recently I did some analysis of voting patterns and found that people using PieFed upvote posts 33 times more than they downvote. We’re a friendly bunch, we want to encourage good contributions, we upvote all the time. In this environment it should be very very easy to have a reputation above zero.
Despite this supportive environment, some people (around 1%) have a negative reputation balance.
People who get downvoted a lot tend to be posting spam, trolling or being exceedingly negative. Sometimes a well-meaning person with strong and well-supported opinions will go ‘against the herd’ and receive unfair downvotes but if they stick around long enough the upvotes they receive for other activity will easily balance this out.
How reputation is used
Spammers
PieFed uses reputation to spot spammers, producing a report to administrators showing the most downvoted content in the last 3 days. This helps admins take action before people report the posts. Consequently, piefed.social is one of the least spammy places on the fediverse.
Administrators can also sort the user list in the admin area by reputation, to find problematic accounts. Also when viewing a list of new accounts, any account with a negative reputation is worth taking a closer look at because it’s usually a spammer.
Trolls
People who get downvoted a lot have a warning icon next to their name, like this:
This warns others that they might not be worth engaging with. The icons are not shown to the person who earned them, to avoid inflaming the situation.
At -3 reputation it’s one orange triangle, at -12 it’s two red triangles.
Roughly 0.4% of active accounts have two red triangles on them. It is exceedingly rare. Most people like that crash around making a mess everywhere then lose interest and go away or get banned.
Direct / private messages
At -10 reputation or lower the account can’t initiate direct messages (although if someone else starts a conversation with them they can reply). Abusive people, who tend to have a low reputation score, often use direct messages as a tool for harassment so this is a safety mechanism.
Trustworthiness
This builds on reputation a bit.
An account is ‘trustworthy’ if they have +100 reputation or are older than 7 days old.
Only trustworthy accounts can initiate direct message conversations. This stops spammers from sending direct messages and stops abusers from making a burner account to send abuse from.
The bio of untrustworthy accounts is not shown to anonymous viewers, to disincentivize spamming links there.
The way PieFed uses the concept of trustworthiness is quite limited. I see this as the beginning of something like what Discourse does but it is not a priority area of development at this time.
Low quality communities
In some communities, which the instance admin designates as ‘low quality’, upvotes on posts do not increase reputation (upvotes on comments on those posts still do, though). Someone who exclusively posts in low quality communities might have a hard time maintaining a positive reputation as downvotes decrease it while upvotes do nothing.
This feature has not turned out to be very useful (I just ban / delete really bad communities) and it’s not used much in practice.
And that’s it
Ultimately, reputation isn’t some gatekeeping tool for participation. It’s just a simple mechanic to help us filter out spam and harassment, while keeping moderation decisions in the hands of real people. To 99% of us, it’s completely invisible.
In the past there were a few more niche situations which dinged accounts for 1 reputation point here and there but it was ineffective and inconsequential (compared to the flood of upvotes most people receive) so those were removed.
I hope this clears things up for people. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments! 🙂