It is my opinion that the upvote-downvote system employed in some social media like Reddit and Youtube is bad, and that karma or number of likes should never be used to measure or rank anything.
Objectives of the Voting System
In an upvote-downvote system, the idea is that users vote on posts or comments to decide what posts should be shown to other users. Upvoting and downvoting changes a post's score, and the post's score is used to decide its position when sorting posts in a ranking, or when The Algorithm recommends them to random users.
The upvote-downvote system is also used as a means for the user to express themselves. Posts that they like, they will upvote, and posts that they don't, won't.
The system is a replacement for the like and reblog system that exists on Tumblr, for example.
Bots
Let's start with the obvious problem first: bots. An immense amount of traffic on the Internet today is just bots, programs automatically accessing websites, often in order to do evil things. People, including me, have to pay more money on web servers to serve these wastes of bandwidth. Their nefarious purposes are a mystery even to me.
If there are votes on a webpage, a bot can manipulate it.
If votes didn't mean anything, there wouldn't be much of a point in doing this unless to harass some specific user who wakes up one day and sees they have -999 karma. However, more votes equals more exposure. Another way to obtain exposure if by purchasing ads on the platform. This means we have a very easy math problem.
If it costs less money to use bots to manipulate votes than it costs to buy ads, people will just use bots.
Naturally, the platforms are very aware of this, since they sell ads to stay afloat. So they fight bots, coming up with all sorts of anti-bot mechanisms. The bot-makers also fight back, coming up with better bots. And this fight just never ends.
Today, with generative AI, bot-makers can make their bots very human-like and fool enough humans to avoid being reported as bots for a very long time. If you can make one bot work, you can make one million bots work. At this scale, you'll live in a social media that has more bots than people, and fighting them back becomes an impossible task.
We also have generative AI to simulate voices. Instagram and Youtube is now filled with ads and posts that are voiced by bots. These generally promote services that may sound legitimate, but think for a moment: if your business is so legitimate, how come you can't even pay a person to voice the lines in your ad? And yet you believe that you need voice lines. For what? Legitimacy? This sounds like a scam to me.
If a business needs bots to promote itself, it's not a business I want to deal with. But bots aren't just posting ads.
Sometimes bots are posting ideas. Their creator may want to manipulate you into thinking something. It's easier to take a position than to change your position on something. This means that the first post to convince you that one side is right wins. It's a bot-race to show everyone one side of the story, one argument, and once it gets inside your mind, you can never get it out.
Like throwing pollutants on a river, bot creators don't care about the environmental damage it does to the Internet when their bots run rampant and upvotes no longer matter. There is a loss of trust in these things.
When you see a question posted on the Internet, I used to think that was a person asking it. Now depending on the platform I either assume it's bait for engagement to get more exposure from the algorithm, or it's someone using a bot to ask questions to take the answers to post in an AI generated article. It's become hard to believe that the person posting the things is a person.
What if there is only you on the Internet, and everyone you interact with is a bot? Like you're surrounded by zombies in an horror movie? This is also known as the Dead Internet Theory. It doesn't make much sense to think that EVERY user is a bot, however, that isn't necessary.
Not all users make posts or even comment. In fact, it's typically said only 1% of the users post content on a platform. Meanwhile, every single bot that is proven to work reliably is going to post far more often than the average human user. Combined, this means you don't need as many bots as humans to take control of the website, you only need as many bots as voting humans.
In fact, you may even need fewer than that, because of the second problem with upvotes: user type bias.
Upvote Power User Type Bias
From here on, let's imagine that bots don't exist, even though they do. Let's imagine that this is a website that has the perfect anti-bot protection, and that all votes are legitimate. Upvotes are still bad.
Have you ever been on a subreddit and thought "all these upvoted posts are bad?" There is a very simple reason for that. It's your fault.
The posts shown on the front page of subreddits are, by default, posts that are both recent and have a large amount of upvotes. If there are enough posts being posted constantly on the subreddit, posts that are older get removed and new posts take their place on this ranking. If there are even more posts being posted, then ONE of the new posts, the one with most upvotes, will join the ranking.
A post with zero upvotes wouldn't make it into this list, so how does this post get any upvotes if nobody can see it? Bots? Nope. Bots don't exist in our perfect website!
On Reddit and Imgur, you can do this weird thing called "sort by new," and doing this you'll see new posts instead of upvoted posts. These new posts can have any number of upvotes, which means they have yet to be vetted by the community. Some of these are the worst posts you can imagine, and sometimes even worse than imaginable. In an Internet so full of content, why would anyone subject themselves to sorting by new? Who knows. Some people are just weird.
Nevertheless, it's these people who sort by new that decide what the people who sort by trending or sort by best get to see. If they decide to upvote a post, you get to see it. If they decide to downvote to oblivion, nobody will ever see it. These are the ultimate protectors of the front page. This is the post police. They detain bad posts and promote good ones. Except not according to any rules or laws, but entirely according to their own preferences and biases.
The posts that most people get to see are a reflection of the collective opinion of an unusual type of user that sorts by new. You have, effectively, delegated to them the power of censure. You never voted for them in the first place, but by letting them vote on the posts by new while you yourself do not participate in this, you have resigned your ability to control what posts are shown to most users.
If a post is good, they have the power to to silence it. And they also have the power to promote even a bad post.
But you may be thinking: if a post is truly bad, wouldn't people on the trending page just downvote it? No. They wouldn't. Because downvoting takes effort.
A post would need to be extraordinarily bad for it to pass the "sort by new" censure and get downvoted by most users on trending. If a post is just okayish bad, most people will look at it, and scroll away, never bothering to downvote it. This means the status of the post will be decided by those that like or agree with it, and by those who really don't like it.
There is also the time factor. The post only stays in the trending pages while it's recent, so even if its score is trending downwards after hitting the front page, it doesn't matter as long as it stays in the front page of the subreddit for a few days until its recency runs out.
The Early Comment Catches the Upvotes
If a thread is sorted by upvote count, the most upvoted comments are always going to be those that were made early, not comments that have any incredible value compared to other comments.
Let's say a new thread gets 50 comments. A user opens the thread and reads only 3 comments, only the 3 most upvoted comments. This user's ability to upvote comments is limited to which comments they can actually see. If they do not keep scrolling down, they won't see anything else, so they can't upvote anything else. Users have a varying number of comments they are willing to scroll through, but EVERY user is going to see the top comments. Consequently, the top comments in the end is the top comment in the start.
Who is going to post that comment at the start? Users who sort threads by new.
If you do not sort by new, not only you can't decide which threads other people see, you also can't have your opinion displayed on everyone's screens because you weren't there before the thread reached the front page.
We can see that the whole upvote system has a huge bias toward a specific type of user who isn't representative of the whole community.
Downvotes Encourage Bullying
When a comment is downvoted, even by a single vote, that encourages a certain kinds of people to harass the user who commented. These are people who have nothing good to say, except call that user an idiot for their comment. They would never say this if the comment wasn't downvoted, because this is bully behavior.
The bully is empowered by having friends. If it was 1-on-1, they would just run away, but if they feel they're harassing someone 3-on-1, they will do it because they're certain they can't lose.
And when they engage in comments, that's just a pointless waste of time, and you should never fall for it.
These people will comment on downvoted comments because they want upvotes from spectators on their side. They know the comment is downvoted which means people disagree with it, so they know they'll get upvotes if they take the opposite stance.
If you find yourself doing this, please stop. You aren't communicating with the person whom you're replying to. You'll dismiss all their arguments and you won't really read anything, because you know it doesn't matter. You're doing it for approval of anonymous Internet users who give you upvotes while downvoting the user whom you're disagreeing with in an Internet fight.
If you aren't interested in having a conversation with someone on the Internet, do not talk to them. Downvote and go away. It's simply not a good form of entertainment to spend your time mocking others just because you have the audience on your side. There are many people who do this, and they even get paid to do this, and it's just very ugly.
Downvotes Suppress Speech
Because downvotes encourage bullying, users who routinely get bullied by this system will simply stop posting things that will get them downvotes because they're tired of having to deal with bullies.
This doesn't mean their opinions have changed, it just means they won't post them on Reddit anymore.
This factor is exacerbated by the fact that some moderators will simply permanently ban users who get downvote for something they said.
When people aren't sure what will get them banned or lead to poor experiences, they'll simply refrain from interacting altogether.
Downvotes Warp Perceptions
In many cases, it's possible to read a single comment in multiple ways. Sometimes you can read something as satire, otherwise as it being the truth. Things that sound wise coming from the mouth of a good person sound cynic coming from the mouth of a bad person. Votes let us know who is a good person and who is bad person from a number alone.
The content of a post will be interpreted in the worst way possible if it has been downvoted. People who are downloved are bad people. Good netizens never get downvotes.
When comments are sorted by controversial, what that really means is show me all the bad people for me to throw tomatoes at. After all, they're bad. It's okay to throw tomatoes at bad people.
A post that in a chronologically ordered forum would be quickly dismissed as an off-mark joke as everyone in the thread returns to the main topic of the thread is treated in threaded, sorted forums as a shining example of everything that is wrong with the world. Dozens of people will comment on how bad the comment is, as its downvote count keeps getting higher and higher.
The poster may be surprised that something they posted without thinking for a second blew up, downwards, wasting dozens of human-hours in comments about it, and even more surprised when a moderator permabans them.
Upvotes are a Lie
The idea behind upvotes is that they are a fair system that allows users to decide what posts are good and what posts are not. This is a complete lie if taken at face value. The votes can be gamed, they're influenced largely by early voters, and there is a tendency that a post will keep getting more votes in one direction or another for no reason other than the amount it currently has.
But that's not all.
Upvotes do not Measure Quality
Any voting system is a popularity contest. The winner is never the best, it's only the most popular. And posts on the Internet are no different.
You can get upvotes on any subreddit by making a post that everyone agrees with about current thing, regardless of the topic of the subreddit. This is a huge flaw in this whole system, as you would expect that you shouldn't be able to make the same post in multiple completely different subreddits and get more upvotes than the average post if the system was ranking things properly in those subreddits.
It's often the case that cheap, relatable memes get more upvotes, and therefore more expose than something that had effort spent on it. Simple, relatable one-page web comics will get more upvotes than any comic with a proper story.
In other words, votes are more about marketing than about work. Delivering a message in an impressive way is more important than having any substance.
As many Reddit users do not even read the article, it doesn't matter if the headline is a total and complete lie because they won't read it either way. They'll upvote it if they agree with the headline, increasing exposure, and maybe that will help reach someone who will actually read it. This kind of clickbait has become common in social media because it unfortunately works. People aren't interested in reading, they're interested in agreeing, or rather, being agreed with.
Upvotes Incentive Slop
Since quality won't get you any upvotes, why bother?
The headlines can be fabricated, the memes can be low quality text on images, the comics can be copy-pasted stickmen, the video can be just something you posted on TikTok, downloaded, and reposted on Reddit to retain the watermark, your essay can be a screenshot from Twitter or Bluesky. What difference does it make? It's going to get upvotes either way!
Nowadays people call what's generated with generative AI "AI slop," and it feels like if it starts inundating Reddit, it will be getting upvotes too.
As I wrote previously, Reddit is a Terrible Platform for Creators, due largely to various subreddits' rules against a loosely defined "self-promotion." But I'm sure most people are still self-promoting, they're just posting from their account without claiming it's their own stuff.
These two things combined, you get content that has the least effort put in it, posted by people who aren't being genuine about the content they are posting, and it still gets upvotes nonetheless because nobody is going to check OP's profile to see what else they have posted.
Proposals
Considering the issues highlighted above, there are some ways I imagine the voting system could be improved. If these have already been applied by Reddit, then I guess it's a lost cause.
1: use factors other than pure vote count to rank posts.
2: mix new posts or comments with trending posts to allow users who don't browse by new to vote on new posts.
3: hide the number of votes.
Karma is a gamification method to manipulate users into posting more because they can get more fake Internet points for validation if they do that. Reddit already provides other gamification methods like achievements. Achievements are personal, so their effects are limited, compared to interpersonal karma that manipulates users into having different opinions about upvoted posts and downvoted posts of other users.
There is just no good reason to show the number of upvotes of one post for other users at all. And this isn't true only for Reddit, but for all social media. In an increasingly botted Internet, what does "one thousand" anything even mean anymore?