If Stack Overflow taught us anything, it’s that
“people will do anything for fake internet points”
Source: Five years ago, Stack Overflow launched. Then, a miracle occurred.
Ever noticed how people online will jump through hoops, climb mountains, and even summon the powers of ancient memes just to earn some fake digital points? It’s a wild world out there in the realm of social media, where karma reigns supreme and gamification is the name of the game.
But what if we could harness this insatiable thirst for validation and turn it into something truly magnificent? Imagine a social media platform where an army of monkeys tirelessly tags every post with precision and dedication, all in the pursuit of those elusive internet points. A digital utopia where every meme is neatly categorized, every cat video is meticulously labeled, and every shitpost is lovingly sorted into its own little corner of the internet.
Reddit tried this strategy to increase their content quantity, but alas, the monkeys got a little too excited and flooded the place with reposts and low-effort bananas. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, employed their chimp overlords for moderation and quality control, but the little guys got a bit too overzealous and started scaring away all the newbies with their stern glares and downvote-happy paws.
But fear not, my friends! For we shall learn from the mistakes of our primate predecessors and strike the perfect balance between order and chaos, between curation and creativity. With a leaderboard showcasing the top users per day, week, month, and year, the competition would be fierce, but not too fierce. Who wouldn’t want to be crowned the Tagging Champion of the Month or the Sultan of Sorting? The drive for recognition combined with the power of gamification could revolutionize content curation as we know it, without sacrificing the essence of what makes social media so delightfully weird and wonderful.
And the benefits? Oh, they’re endless! Imagine a social media landscape where every piece of content is perfectly tagged, allowing users to navigate without fear of stumbling upon triggering or phobia-inducing material. This proactive approach can help users avoid inadvertently coming across content that triggers phobias, traumatic events, or other sensitive topics. It’s like a digital safe haven where you can frolic through memes and cat videos without a care in the world, all while basking in the glory of a well-organized and properly tagged online paradise.
So next time you see someone going to great lengths for those fake internet points, just remember - they might just be part of the Great Monkey Tagging Army, working tirelessly to make your online experience safer, more enjoyable, and infinitely more entertaining. Embrace the madness, my friends, for in the chaos lies true innovation! But not too much chaos, mind you – just the right amount to keep things interesting.
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Thats actually pretty cool. It needs to be insanely well engineered so you dont get trolls to „moderate“ for points and throw out every person on the platform. Also, the hivemind needs to be kept in check so group think is not as brutal.
Some sort of appeal process to deal with human bias and punish moderators abusing power and remove their privileges would help address concerns about potential troll moderators.
This is a terrible idea. Stack Overflow is an example of what not to do
I’ve based the idea on Discourse which has very good moderation. I don’t know why everyone is talking about StackExchange, did I mention it anywhere?
Stack Overflow employs it for moderation and quality control.
Ive had almost every question ive ever posted on stack overflow sites locked claiming the question is answered elsewhere even though the question they point to is not the same as mine. Its so frustrating posting on those sites cuz everyone claims i should do what im asking some other convoluted way or that the question is the same as others which are outdated or completely irrelevant.
Yeah, and the FOSS alternative Codidact isn’t any better. What’s the point of asking for solutions for bugs when even an LLM can solve that already? I want proper solutions to actual problems so that I can find everything in there, not just troubleshooting bugs.
I like it.
Tags solve a few problems:
- they add context to posts and we all want a semantic web
- they would allow people to find posts and content across the Fediverse where, despite ActivityPub) it can be difficult finding material between different services. One click of a tag and we can see posts on, cfir example, Stonehenge on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, BookWyrm, etc or multi-tag to see only selfies taken there or news or scientific articled, etc.
Most people would just do this anyway if available (I always run fine-grained categorisation where available) but gamify it you get a lot better coverage, especially if people can tag other people’s posts, and the coverage would be a lot more comprehensive.
Fediseer would seem like a good hub for this but there’s nothing stopping a FediTag or FediHub springing up or you could federate it, so there’d be lots of instances - lemmy.world could run tag.lemmy.world and all the tags on l.w would point to it. It may even be possible for various services to bundle this in, so all tags are “local” and your, for example, l.w account gives you an account on the l.w FediTag instance so you can follow them, get notifications of new posts, etc.
Sorry, just thinking outloud but I like it even more.
Gamifying the editing of other people’s posts and editing semantics of content after-the-fact
Yeahhhhhh no, I think you just suggested StackOverflow without taking even a look at the recent or not recent discussions on how it behaves (eg.: the moderator strike) or why.
I think there are ways this could be kept in check, but basically you’d be providing an incentive towards just going around and adding tags for content nilly-willy, potentially leading to something very similar to SO’s “closed as duplicate” (duplicate is on a completely different language / software stack / problem domain) issue.
Or just use proof of work? I shouldn’t have to climb mountains to participate in discussions online
I don’t know how that works. Why would have to do anything to participate in the discussions? The curation can be done by whoever wants to do it.
This leads to over-moderation. People on SE will flag and remove stuff that really shouldn’t be removed because it gives them points.
Gameificarion of moderation is bad. Just look at Stack Exchange.
How would that work?
Rate limiting by calculations. See mCaptcha on GitHub. This is what hetzner uses, and many other websites
