Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.
Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.
Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor’s desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.
Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!
I don’t think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn’t good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.
Pretty sure someone who owns a server could just give themselves reputation points.
Which is why the reputation system can’t be based on something the user’s server says, but must be based on third parties the person checking the reputation trusts.
To give an example, @zaktakespictures@social.goodanser.com might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/photography@lemmy.world, having first posted 8 days ago, last posted today, posted 4 times in total.
You can check that manually by looking at the user page on lemmy.world and see that the posts were not removed by the community’s moderators, but you cannot check that the account is not banned as far as I know. What I have in mind would let your server query that sort of thing automatically and set up lists of communities you’ll trust to vouch for users.
There could be several options to deal with a user who doesn’t have reputation, such as not letting them post, holding their posts for moderation, or having a spam filter scrutinize their posts.
There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.
One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.
I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.
Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.
I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.
I am personally indifferent. Never really cared on all my accounts on Reddit.
I’ll admit that I had a bit of pride in my 550k+ karma on my main reddit account, but I’m quite open to sacrificing this for less toxicity.
Why were you pride about it if you allow me to ask.
No OP but number goes up equals dopamine rush. Same reason I played RuneScape for so long.
No
Karma ends up being the reason people post content - just look at Reddit and you see it; repost bots, people karma-whoring in comments, posting the same tired shit over and over just because it gets upvotes, etc.
We shouldn’t need gamification to drive engagement. We’re not a single corporate entity trying to drive profits. Early internet forums managed for a long time to get people participating because they wanted to participate, not because they felt the need to make an ultimately meaningless number go up.
Personally, my favorite thing about Lemmy (vs. Kbin specifically) is that there’s no account-level karma equivalent. I would be very disappointed if it was ever added.
You know what’s funny? I think I voted more on comments here than my several years of reddit already. Having votes kept to individual comments instead of tallied up in your profile like this just feels better to me.
No, karma turned Reddit into a hive mind. Everyone knew what everyone expected in each community and would push people to stay in line in order to not get downvoted.
Yes, because it can be an indicator of reputation of someone.
No, because of the ease of getting it, as well as it can be a basis of someone’s ego.
Actually, any number that is attached to person has the same set of pros and cons, except of the ease, persumably. This includes SO’s rep system, Reddit’s karma system, YouTube subscriber/view/video count, Twitter followers/post count, etc. Adding karma system to Lemmy may have its side effects, but even there isn’t one, it may not matter since Lemmy has post and comments counts.
EDIT: In the end, when I’m reading Reddit or Lemmy, I gave no attention to the karma, and instead the vote count of the post/comment itself. Call me ignorant, but whatevs.
No thank you.
Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.
But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.
You can easily accumulate karma just by saying what everyone obviously wants you to say. I have 4 Reddit accounts with 6 figure karma and trust me, unless it’s about a topic I am familiar with, what I have to say isn’t any more insightful than some other person who has no or negative karma.
I don’t think it would serve any purpose
