Speaking of people misusing a feature, I think the very act of “faving” something would be misappropriated - if it was meant to be what the user thinks is good, then people applying different definitions of “good” would be working at cross-purposes. e.g. someone who claims that the holocaust never happened could either be making a wildly popular and perfectly acceptable statement, or else the exact opposite, depending on context. THAT issue… seems insurmountable to me, personally, unless a LOT more effort went into implementation. Maybe if it were something like an automated cross-posting / nomination process to the BestOf magazine, that could work? So one user could nominate the comment to a Best-Of mag, another could nominate the same comment to a Worst-Of one, still another could nominate it to a Most-Silly one, etc. Just like crowsourcing restaurant reviews!:-) In any case, people barely use that mag as it is, so it seems a nonstarter at least atm, and also, look out vulnerable restaurant reviews turned out to be:-(.

We almost might need like a separate voting system - one for “likes” and another for “something else”, so that when you sort, you can either see the “popular” stuff, or you could shuffle past that and get to the “other”. In Reddit, I think that was mostly accomplished by having each sub be the arbiter of its own policies - so something “popular” in r/AskHistorians would NOT be so popular in r/Memes, and vice versa. Good fences make good neighbors and so on. Although mods and users alike would also decry even in a place such as AskHistorians how end-users would abuse the upvote, turning it into a “like” button where you click it if you agree with the content, rather than indicating its relevance to the discussion. Also relevant is how large the communities are, so like if r/AskHistorian had only, lets say for ease of theoretical discussion “100 active members” (or rather, that being a useful approxomation thereof, like 100 people that contribute daily, or 200 people that contribute every other day, or 5-700 people that contribute once a week, and so on), while if r/Memes has “1 million active members”, then even inside a post within the r/AskHistorian sub, if the users of r/Memes were to ever see it somehow (it appearing on r/All lets say), then they could unintentionally brigade the smaller community, completely overwhelming their normal likes and dislikes with artificial ones, even (and highly likely) entirely unintentionally.

Potentially that could be solved by using sub-specific karma, like someone’s vote who has been in the sub for ten years could carry substantially more weight than someone who literally just joined a moment ago, made a reply, then immediately unsubscribed. The down-side there is that someone who had been in the sub for ten years would have to be careful to not throw their weighting around willy-nilly, and drown out people who have “only” been there like 2 years. The devil is in the details indeed, to working out such a system.

Although people on the Fediverse seem ADAMANTLY opposed to any such system of weighted voting, despite the best intentions. I think the argument goes: let the content be the deciding factor. …

And… I am exceeding the character limit again. I guess I should be more diligent about cutting back on my social media, as that Enui Engine article said:-), and if a response is worth writing, then I should find a way to do it within the limitations provided. That said, I’m going to allow myself to do it one more time b/c it is nearly midnight and I’m too tired to rewrite it, and having come this far it seems better than simply not responding at all?