Against Lemmy Karma

I'm gonna make my own instance with karma...once you hit a set limit your account is locked forever and your ip blocked for 30days...

I’m a Reddit mod. I absolutely needed to filter users by karma AND account age. The amount of bot posts is exhausting and impossible to keep up with without a filtering method. If the fediverse continues to grow, something will need to be implemented here too.

Can’t say I agree. I miss karma. Not because I want it, because I don’t care. But that imaginary internet point sure drives a lot of content - and even repeat content has a purpose to drive platform growth. I had like 1,000 subs and FREQUENTLY saw something for the first time that the tHiS iS a RePoSt people came out of the woodwork for.

You know something? Until you mentioned it with this thread, I hadn't even noticed that karma wasn't a thing here. That is how useless the karma system is.

I say let the community mostly manage itself through the voting, so the mods can only step in for the really bad stuff.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what was Karma more than upvotes minus downvotes?

I think it's a very bad idea to have karma as well. It shaped reddits entire conversation structure to be all about karma farming, since people think a high karma number means higher status in the community.

I don't see any positives with it. Let people's comments stand on their own for what they say, not because they have high karma.

I think that karma is an obstacle to free thought. People prefer to remain silent instead of expressing their opposing opinions while declaring ideas that are more in line with the prevailing opinion of the community than their own in order to gain karma.

If someone wants karma they could host a modified instance where every post gets thousands of upvotes for free. Other instances can't really verify whether that's accurate.

I'm sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It's called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone's profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn't being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.

[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that's a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]

Wasn't the minimal karma requirement so someone couldn't just make a new account and immediately hop back into a subreddit they were banned from to cause more issues? New accounts should only see that issue one time.....

I have never been sure what the point of caring about karma is. Pretty much it only gives a rough idea of how long an account has been open and how active it's been. 5, 50,000, 500,000? 5 Million? Who cares. It's not like you can do anything with it besides see the number change. I never have really seen anyone comparing karma or caring about other people's scores.

The only real thing it did was set a way for subs to disallow posting by new/troll accounts. There could easily be a way for lemmy to calculate a sum of votes on someone's most recent posts if people thought that was a useful or desired feature.

Lmao... The TOTAL karma one had was never important. They will still look at how many upvotes is next to their comment, because that's a measure of attention. They still want attention.

It won't make a difference if you can see your total karma or not, ppl will farm upvotes.

I also hope awards are never added. Reddit had sooooo many and it was really annoying in the end with all the flashy, distracting “awards” on the comment sections.

I've already seen people crying about their posts not getting upvotes or whatever. People will do the stupidest things for magic Internet points.

Karma/reputation is currently a thing here, it just isn't rendered in Lenny's UI. Memmy and Mlem for iOS both show totals on the user profile page.

I'm fine with the count as it is now

Amen. There is not a single purpose for a "karma counter" to exist other than to promote toxic behavior between other users.

"But what about griefers?!"

Report button exists for a reason -- you don't need to bust a griefer twice.

I am very much against the karma system. However, I respect others' desires to have it. The fortunate thing about the fediverse is that if we don't want karma we can use an instance that doesn't use karma, and vice versa.

Agree. Useless feature and promotes trash content.

Lemmy actually tracks karma. It just doesn't show it anywhere.

But as an admin I can dig in the database and see people's karma if I felt like it

If karma is added here i feel i would have to abandon Lemmy, ive been (arguably) doing a good thing promoting artists over on Digital Art, ive already been accused of being a bot, which is fine, last thing i need is for people to assume im only doing it for karma too.

I think the fact you said you don't care about moderation issues kind of shows the disconnect. On reddit, karma was a crucial way to moderate. I think something similar is a good idea for federated replacements.

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I can see how many points I have on every post. I can see my total points.

How's that different?

Hear hear 👏 Don’t post for the glory.

The content you’re putting into the fediverse should be for everyone. You no longer own it.

I'll play devil's advocate: one benefit I could see to Reddit's karma system is that it can quickly filter out spam or alt accounts from more serious communities.

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I was actually about to make a post about this, addressing this issue, but more glad this is already up.

I'm not a fan of any karma system, regardless of platform. People really tie themselves to reactions, likes, upvotes, downvotes .etc to where it cripples them. Nothing they say or do becomes authentic and natural anymore. They say or do things for the specific purpose to get something to validate what they're saying or doing.

And it creates this frustrating system where we end up having to deal with farmers. Reddit is ingrained with it, because we've seen it one too many times. People reposting junk, they get thousands of upvotes and they aren't held accountable for it. We've also seen people perform downvote brigades, hence coining the term 'downvoted to oblivion'. Where, people proactively downvote every post and comment someone has made because of some spite and out of emotion in regards to an opinion that was said.

And they know the effects of these things, because we tie ourselves way too much into it. I'd like to not see scoring or karma systems everywhere. They do nothing but encourage the worst out of anyone to exploit them. They're meaningless, it's just an internet toy that people play with when so many platforms try so hard to describe their importance. But in the end, it's just a stupid internet toy that serves NO purpose.

I agree. The less flair, the better, imo. Ideally, I would like it to stay as it is now, where your username and avatar are the only reputational markers, and upvotes and downvotes are only officially tracked on a per post basis. If you want to increase your reputation, then put out quality posts that make people remember your username.

Any other additional flair/reputation trackers besides that incentivise low effort posts. Those posts are entertaining, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to see how lemmy evolves without directly incentivising them.

Edit: wording

Karma sucks, i nuked my reddit accounts every 6 months to stop myself getting hooked on it

Agreed

Say "No!" to the karma ho.

I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up

I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow

What we don't need is karma done badly, and there's a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it

I don’t know why we have Karma system, people can just buy an account if they’re banned or such. The system that Digg had was never build to locked people out, it was to make things popular.

Can someone explain how Jerboa up/downvotes aren't karma? I don't quite understand how karma isn't already a thing here.

I've mentioned it in a another post but I don't want any visible points at all. I think the counts for upvotes, downvotes, etc should all be hidden.

The Reddthat instance that I'm on also has disabled down voting which I'm also all for. On Reddit, down voting very often became a tool for vocalizing what you disagreed with rather than a low effort or inappropriate post.