Users should not be able to "Like" their own posts.
I believe the possibility to "Like" or "give "Karma" to one's own posts is too easily exploited and serves no positive purpose.
There are users who continually repost their own videos and give themselves Karma every time.
There are users who have hundreds of Karma points attached to their name, but if you remove all the points they've given themselves, they're actually only in double figures.
Karma is currently so rare on Blender.Today that it really does stand out when a post has a point or points, so the headline attracts more attention but it's false and misleading if the creator has added the points.
I think we can safely assume that if a user has decided to share a post with the community, that is their attribution of "Karma".
It's just entirely too easy to artificially inflate one's own apparent status in the community.
It should be up to others to decide if your contribution is worthy of recognition so the solution is simple; the creator of the post cannot add Karma or "like their own post".
5 Comments
I support that motion 100%
Ryan, artist.b and a number of other prolific posters should have their "selflikes" removed from the system.
Posters who continually plug their own videos should be dessuaded from doing so. Perhaps by creating some sort of tutorial-group that people can visit.
Meanwhile we can support decent posters by not supporting the others. I for one never even consider opening a post by artist.b and his ilk. If the posting by him here looks interesting, I usually find another similar posting on YT by other creators. Often the very video that had it's content copied.
I see there have been some tiny movements made regarding this topic.
RyanKingArt seems to have stopped liking his own posts and he even went as far as to remove the likes he attributed to his own posts, though only the ones which appeared on the Blender.Today homepage at the time when you pointed it out to him. Not ideal, but most certainly a first step.
I'm afraid artist.b may be a lost cause. They are straight up lying to you in comments and continuing to like their own posts.
If we consider that artist.b has 297 Karma to their name, and have made 249 posts. Their recent activity strongly suggests that they add a Like to every one of their posts so if we discount them from the total, that leaves 48 points. Very different from their "apparent" 297.
Any user with just short of 300 Karma on this site will appear to be a very important component of the community with widely appreciated contributions which, in this case, appears to be simply not true.
And it is even worse that most of artist.b's work is simple remakes of other people's work.
Add to that the constant repostings, where he/she/it/they again likes their own post, we should ask the moderators to take action.
If the like/karma system doesn't get fixed, it should be removed.
Yeah. artist.b really does seem to be something special. I've seen that they are not averse to reposting their own videos, even several times, and liking themselves every time.
Could you provide links to the video tutorials they are remaking?
RyanKing is to be commended for his efforts to correct the situation, but it appears "BlenderDumbass" and SnoXc have discovered this loophole as well.
As I see it, there are at least two solutions to the issue;
I find the current system of simply "moving on" from any post I dislike to be lacking. It means that, as far as any user is concerned, there is no difference between something of which they actively disapprove, and something about which they feel entirely ambivalent.
I understand the compulsion some feel to only ever be positive about everything and anything but that is naïve and opens way too many gates for those willing to mislead and con others for their own benefit.
Now, clearly, the inverse is also true insofar as users may dislike posts for nefarious reasons. A solution to this could be the requirement of a brief explanation of the reasoning behind the dislike. This would not be a dropdown menu of pre-prepared options but a field into which one would type their opinion.
This input would then appear below the post as a comment;
That way, the reader might see "I dislike this post because: adfafsadfasdfafd" and infer that the dislike is not genuine.
I'm afraid we're fighting a losing battle here. The devs clearly want the community to function this way so they're not going to do anything to remedy the situation.
I just took a look at the home page and here's what I saw; There are 15 posts displayed. There are 9 karma points distributed among these posts. Only 3 of those points are legitimate.
artist.b, Dr.H, and stann co
There's a user with 38 karma and only 2 posts! How? By liking their own comments on other people's posts... The "karma" system is meaningless and so exploitable as to be useless.
These users are benefitting from abusing the system and so they're not going to stop doing so in the name of honesty.
It doesn't look like it's going to change so we either live with it or just leave the site alone entirely.