Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.

That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:

• You need site (or community) staff, who are not constrained by reputation limits, to police the system
• Upvoting is disabled until you have at least a little reputation
• Downvoting is disabled until you have a decent amount of reputation and costs you reputation
• Upvotes grant more reputation than downvotes take away
• Voting fraud is a bannable offense and there are methods in place to detect it
• The system is designed to discourage reuse of content
• Not all activities can be upvoted or downvoted. For example, commenting on SO requires a minimum amount of reputation, but unless they’re reported as spam, offensive, fraudulent, etc. (which also requires a minimum reputation), they don’t impact your reputation, even if upvoted.

If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.

You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.

Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.

Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to <other server> at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.

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

I didn’t read your post, I just downvoted because I don’t like your username. Whatcha’ going to do about it?

(Jk, I picked the instance I joined based on the fact that it doesn’t do downvotes. I think downvotes drive perverse incentives)

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

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.

It’s just not that good of a metric overall. Not just because it would be easy to fake it, but also because it would inevitably divide into tribes that unconditionally upvote eachother. See: politics in western countries.

You can pile up a ton of reputation and still be an asshole and still get a ton of support from like-minded people.

The best measure of someone’s reputation is a quick glance and their post history.

Why do we need to know how many up or down votes a user has? Assholes usually make themselves known pretty quickly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One issue specific to the Fediverse is that each instance and each community might have its own standard for what it considers “credible”—and part of another user’s credibility score might come from users on instances with which yours isn’t federated and doesn’t share information.

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

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.

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.