[kwgardner]

Imzy actually has removed karma for users, precisely for that reason. It's usually something that ends up only being there for people to game and creates more negative consequences than the good it's intended for. You can like/upvote comments and posts, but there aren't downvotes, and how well a post does doesn't reflect on the users in any way.

[gkya]

That's nice. Actually the efficiency of karma in the context of online forums should be statistically studied, maybe comparing Imzy to Reddit for amounts of spam, clickbait, attention-seekers, etc., but Imzy is invite only now.

What do you (assuming you are someone from Imzy, sorry if not) do with spam, when there are no downvotes? Do you have a flagging system, automodding, spam filters, etc.?

[kwgardner]

We have a report flag on every post and comment to allow items to be escalated and reviewed. Users are required to explain why they are reporting something so that it's hopefully not just used as a downvote. (And, tbh, downvotes don't really help with catching spam since most of the time they're just to show disagreement or make sure comments that aren't worth being seen don't get seen as much.)

We have the nascent stages of algorithms that will help us with tracking spam and such, but those take time and data to become better, and we're pretty small right now. They will grow as we do. That's one of the reasons we're invite-only right now. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.