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?
Upvotes and downvotes exist to filter bad content. Anything that tracks points per user will just lead to toxic karma whoring and bots, as demonstrated by Reddit.
In my opinion, Lemmy shouldn't turn into a Reddit clone, it should learn from Reddit's plethora of mistakes.
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.
In my humble opinion: Karma (mainly slashdot onwards, even though some Usenet groups had it) and other "Internet points" originally were meant as weeding tools to reassure other readers/commentators that the poster or commenter was respected/reputable and not only a troll/shill/other-individual-gain. This went haywire along the way (not only on Reddit, but much more aggravated on Reddit) leading to karma-farming accounts who gained more reach and lead. Such as the corvine posting guy who finally was banned by Reddit admins when he used alt accounts to upvote his and his ingroups comments, and downvoting every critics comments.
Alt-accounts and shill voting has been rampant, and you could even buy upvotes from karma farms or sell your karma-rich account to karma farmers or indirect advertisers. It has become a whole economy.
My silly cat, funny and gif photos on Fediverse are not intending to farm karma for myself, it's to increase content in subs, and just like on Reddit, the longer I'll be here the more I will lurk and less I will post.
I truly hope karma doesn't become a thing in the Fediverse. But I would ideally like a system where we can ignore or ban trolls, while rewarding content creators, level headed moderators and sound and just instances.
Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.
I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.
Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for "Funny", "Insightful", etc, and one of those flags could be "Gild" that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by "Helpful" or "Funny" based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.
Also, "Karma" isn't always a good metric for the quality of a post. On the contrary, even. At least in the subs I was a regular in, posts about in-depth guides, interactive maps, actually useful explanations etc. usually recieved very little recognition compared to (pardon my language) lazy, no-effort shitposts, reposts and memes.
Maybe, only maybe a "comparison" system could work, something like an upvote-to-downvote ratio without raw numbers ("username's karma is 98% positive and 2% negative" instead of "user has 45,992 Karma") so there is no real incentive to amass meaningless internet points but others could still see whether they're dealing with a troll if the "negative" side is noticably bigger.
..in the end, I'd still prefer a no-karma-at-all-system over anything else. Creating content for the sake of offering good content to the community, that's the best approach IMHO.
An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.
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.
Not just no, but heck no, and no algorithm either. Karma at a glance doesn't tell you anything about quality. High karma users can be anything from insightful posters to inflammatory shitstains to literally not even human. It's not useful for keeping new accounts from spamming - new accounts are created every single day en masse for the sole purpose of accruing karma by any means for the distinct purpose of being sold to spammers.
Karma also tanks discussions - every slightly big Reddit post is flooded with people repeating the same stupid "in"-jokes and puns that were funny 7 years ago by people and bots trying to boost their karma. The first few comment threads in every post become absolutely useless at best, and at worst, bots and bad faith actors clog up the pipes with ongoing spam efforts and purposely deceitful and manipulative misinformation campaigns that are demonstrably harmful to society.
Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities. I personally think that while Lemmy acts as a great alternative to Reddit there's no compelling argument for trying to make Lemmy an exact copy of Reddit. Lemmy doesn't need to be a one-to-one mirror image of a website that we're all literally fleeing because it's a giant shit pile. IMHO.
A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.
Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That's a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.
I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn't be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.
I think karma was used as a way to indirectly help their promotions. High karma accounts would have higher prominence on big subreddits, so their posts were more visible and thus more profitable. Reddit (company) wanted big communities, so the problem was a non-problem to them because it drove fake engagement and made their metrics look more valuable from a sales perspective.
Why wouldn't it be better? The focus should be on the content of the posts and their validity, not based on an accumulative metric that is mistaken for credibility.
No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc.. I've actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn't have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.
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!
Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.
That is a good point. I put a long indepth and very heavily researched post with a heap of links to sources on one of my local subs on there. It was downvoted to oblivion because people didnt like it. You have changed my mind as I was about to say I was in favour of the karma system, but you are right, it does need to work differently
Yeah, I think it still needs some sort of karma system because otherwise it would turn into another unmoderated and uncontrollable 4chan hell hole, full of off-topic spam and shit posts. I'm not sure if that's what we want. I don't think, moderators alone can handle that.
Hah, I mean, we have GPT/LLM. We could use AI to filter off-topic posts and spam, and hand out karma... Just a dystopic thought that popped up in my mind.
Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.
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 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.
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.
When I was really young I just started saying what was popular and started accumulating tons of points on OSNews. It was a learning experience: I realized I wasn't being true to myself and I learned to recognize it and stop.
It's a useful skill to have, predicting what people wanna hear. There's a guy who manages the place I play pool. He's a bit of a dick, enough I don't wanna spend time in his company, but staying on his good side means my time spent there is more enjoyable. None of our conversations are ever of consequence and they never last more than 15 seconds because he doesn't like people (he literally wears a hat that says "I hate people" to his job where his responsibility is the management of people). So I just treat him like a dramatic subreddit and say what I think he wants me to say and as a result, he treats me slightly better than the rest of the people there.
Sometimes lol. But like I said it's more that the karma I do have comes from the following topics: cooking, pool (the game not the hole with water), engineering, and Ted Lasso. If you get me too far away from those topics, or too far out of my specific expertise in engineering, then looking at my karma to gauge my level of authority on the topic would lead you wrong.
That's how reddit felt in general, unless you were in some niche or heavy moderated sub to stay on topic. Meaningful comments were mostly buried by jokes.
Karma is a great method of driving interaction, but like you've highlighted, it can result in a lot of unwanted behaviors.
Other social media is a good example of what to be avoided. People are driven to gather more followers and their content devolves into the lowest common denominator rapidly.
I wouldn't mind some form of recognition for people that contribute good content to communities, but I don't know exactly what that would look like.
As far as karma goes, we have a technological limitation in the fediverse, where your karma would be limited to the instance your user account is registered on. They could figure out how to make it work, but I'm just not sure it's worth the effort. We have a lot of other things to focus on atm.
I think the upvote downvote system is a really great way to see what sort of ideas divide a community, as long as we can see both upvotes and downvotes. Reddit just made it a goal to farm as many upvotes as possible for that silly little Karma number to go up. I think karma (in a backend sense) could work for mods to be able to see problem users etc. but even then its still a pretty silly idea.
I hang out on a lot of informational subs and voting absolutely helps more reasonable comments get seen at the top. It’s not perfect. It can go wrong a couple of ways. But I’m surprised you’d say you can’t think of any use for it. Maybe you’re thinking about post karma and I’m thinking about comment karma.
No, karma isn't necessarily an indication of good quality. It's also easy to boost your karma on a decentralized social media by creating accounts on multiple instances and upvote your content
I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.
The karma system, as we former redditors know it, is susceptible to abuse (especially on a decentralized platform), results in a drive to repost popular content repeatedly, and is a poor representation of quality contributions. My vote would be no.
The "karma system" is a perfect example of why giving power/control to users is a bad idea -- it will always be exploited/abused in one way or another. Something something "this is why we can't have nice things."
Anyone here old enough to remember slashdot? I liked their karma system. The maximum a post could get was +5, and I think the minimum was -1. I don't quite recall the details, but it was pretty effective. People didn't shamelessly karma farm because there wasn't any point. If you are at +5 there's nowhere else to go.
I know it's still around but it's a ghost town these days like everywhere else on the internet outside of like five sites. A shadow of its former self. I really miss the vibrant community there, it was a pretty special place on the internet in its day.
I remember slashdot’s voting system (+5 insightful! You chose an attribute to describe why you were voting up or down the post), but did they have an all-time karma total displayed?
I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO
I also prefer original content. But maybe we could use some reposters, at least at first, just to get lemmy going and keep things interesting. I don't think there's enough content right now to keep me engaged.
I think natural engagement will happen but on a less frequent scale. A lot of what had reddit working for them was the bots which would near real time post Twitter links or news stories, which would result in natural discussion threads
Edit to explain:
The karma system reddit has, is obviously detrimental to the quality of content. Some people see it as a game, and play for karma, rather than actually posting something that is meaningful to them.
Others put to much significance into it, and get bummed if they are not upvoted, because they think karma equals popular.
I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.
Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.
On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.
On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Whilst it's really up-votes that do most of the "pleasure of social recognition" side, karma amps that by adding a score and all the game-like elements of it, such as competitiveness between "players". (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).
Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless, maybe, if karma was per-sub.
Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.
I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn't even notice there wasn't any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there's no need for it sitewide.
I don't think so. I never payed attention to karma or gold or gifts at all. Tbh I never understood them and personally don't feel a need for any of it.
Lolz that's crazy... we should only take good ideas from Reddit.
I'm happy that most folks (in this thread, at least) seem to be of a similar mindset.
I struggled with Karma for a month, then I jumped on a few new 'DadJokes' and copy pasted a couple of puns - masses of Karma meant I could carry on trolling.
Votes are the way to push good/relevant comments upwards or downwards - and without value outside the thread, they'll only be used for that... as it should be.
I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm.
People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.
Karma is just a drug for Reddit addicts. Just let each post stand on its own regardless of who posts it. We don't need that extra layer of crap. I always disliked that.
I personally feel like community karma is a useful metric for quickly evaluating someone's presence in a specific community. Site-wide karma is far too easily-gamble to be a useful metric, though, and whether you had a post go crazy on a big sub means nothing in evaluating whether you're a good contributor to a small sub
Site-wide karma is easy to game and not particularly informative. Community karma can be a good measure of how involved an account is in a specific community
Nah, we don't need that here. Karma has always been senseless IMO. I always hated when I wanted to post, or even comment on a certain sub and I couldn't because I DiDn'T hAvE eNoUgH kArMa.
I like it for filtering out low quality posters, but as we learned at /r/, that just led to the bots re-posting top posts for karma so they could then be used for spamming.
I think our society is likely better off without a persistent cumulative score next to our names, though.
Agreed. I think we need to start fostering this type of thought process, where people want to engage because they want to engage, not for points or money or anything.
The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.
When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.
Yes and no, when you get into something where the forum is used for advice and collaborating, seeing that others typically have a positive experience with someone can be helpful. Like I said, it's limited. Karma is kinda stupid.
The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.
A very good function for a real credible user particularly accrediting real professions/experts in such knowledge/education (still it does not guarantee an infallible and reliable info ahead, so still requiring thorough fact-checking, critical thinking and crystal clear pondering. At least, it will ease enough for naive users to identify who are admirable and who are sus. Think of Youtube channel counts of subscribers, likes and total views into a positive outcome.)
But also, for cons, it's not good as a policy to gatekeep low-count (innocent😭) users from freely posting on busy and crowded communities (mods [cause they're humans and volunteers] have preferred that so they'll ease filtering "thousands" of comments of "hundred-thousands" of post, just aiming baneful and deceiving trolls away from communities, but not so efficiently after all.)
I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.
Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.
Absolutely. Even when our rational brain jokes about "worthless internet points", our monkey minds see "big number mean me good". I'm man enough to admit it, having a well liked comment feels good. But it's not good for me.
we could prevent spam and low effort posts if whe had rules like "x amount of karma to post" allthough its more of a burden for new users to post if its set too high and right now, there is no need for such a system.
at that point i think its better to leave it as it is and introduce an improved karma like system in the future i guess.
I don't want Karma, but I'd really like to get notifications when a post or comment of mine hits certain vote thresholds, e.g. 5/10/50/100/... upvotes/downvotes. I think this would help me get a feel of how my posts are received. Currently, if a post of mine gets 50 upvotes, I most likely won't ever notice unless I actively monitor all of my posts.
But with the notification I'd get a nice dopamine rush as reward for posting good content ;)
I think post karma and comment karma are very different things. Post karma is not as meaningful to me, because all it's really telling you is how badly someone wants to be a karma hog. But comment karma shows a little about someone's engagement and longevity. Only a little though. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.
Definitely against karma.
Some retard can say something smart once in a while, would you dismiss what he says based on his karma.
Opposite is true, a smart ass can be completely wrong and yet have huge karma.
I like the idea of having up and down votes but not tracking the total by user. Having no reason to farm karma points could prevent a lot of the jackassery that happens over there.
Yes this exactly. having karma and effects attached to it only causes people seriously looking to be malicious to farm karma. It leads to all sorts of stupid and unusual shit on Reddit and we don't need that here.
I pay attention to individual comments, as feedback from people. The karma total, though, I never think about it at all. I started just deleting my reddit accounts every 2-4 months anyway. Pretty meaningless to me. We could have it on Lemmy or not. I’d be just as interested in all-time word count.
Shit I was on reddit for ten years or so and I had a game where I'd delete my account whenever I hit 100k karma. I think I had three or four that went that high. My last one was at 13k or so when the protests went live and I deleted mine and came to Lemmy.
It's just a metric that shows how an individual understands the community as a whole and what will get upvoted. Quality is irrelevant if you agree with the hive mind and post lots of in-jokes on "rising" threads.
We absolutely need a trust system. I don't know if it should be a Karma system.
Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.
ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.
The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don't know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.
But programs are tasked by their creators, and if their long-term goal is spam, then we know what their tactics are.
A GPT-bot designed to have good discussions with the community would get upvotes and karma (at least, to the best extent that these programs can do). A GPT-bot designed to spam the community with links or shill a product would probably get downvotes.
So distinguishing between good-bots and bad-bots is still karma / reputation management.
No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.
Similarly the most voted ideas does not mean they are good ideas,
However, it is right that ideas that are too shitty go into the oblivion of downvotes.
I say don't bother - if it can be gamed by bots, it will. Even Slashdot's mod/meta-mod system could be gamed by the current generation of bots, because a lot of comments / reposts look fine out of context.
If you don't have karma there's nothing to farm, and that means fewer karma farming bots and better overall quality of content.
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.
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.
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, @[email protected] might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/[email protected], 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.
I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.
Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.
In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.
But if it did I'd prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.
It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.
So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.
Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!
In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.
Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my 'FunDisasterLemmy' instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn't relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.
It might even make sense to let communities have customizable voting. For example, a 'ChangeMyMind' community could have a 'Did Change My Mind' and 'Did Not Change My Mind' vote option (vs the practice in the Reddit sub of replying with a frustratingly-difficult-to-type character), or YTA, NTA, EAA, etc. (though in that case I suppose that's more of a poll option)
I don't see what problem it solves. You can already look at your posts and comment history and see what got upvoted, if that's something that you care about.
I have over 350k karma on reddit. They are magic internet points worth exactly nothing, we don't need that here. Though I wouldn't mind being able to award people if they say something super cool. Maybe an award a day or a week to give away might be fun. They're still worth nothing, but sometimes a post deserves a little bit more than just an upvote and a little internet sticker on the post is just the thing.
They aren't exactly worth nothing. If you have too low karma (in a subreddit), your comments will be hidden etc.
I uttered an unpopular opinion in a sub once, got downvoted to oblivion for it, and since then every single one of my comments is hidden. You always need to carefully judge how many unpopular opinions you can say in a subreddit until your karma falls below the threshold.
Karma never achieved any of those on Reddit. You want a number? A useful one is "blocked/banned by X number of users/communities". That's a much more useful indicator of bad actors. A bot, or suspected bot flag as well. This things should only be visible to mods and admins, but by all mods and admins. This would filter the bad actors from the site more effectively.
A useful one is “blocked/banned by X number of users/communities”
That won't work at all because bot and spam accounts can constantly be created
A bot, or suspected bot flag as well
That also won't work for new bot and spam accounts.
This is why many communities in different platforms have the option to set minimum account age or karma in reddit's case. I guess they could introduce an invisible point system? I'm not sure and I can't think of a solution myself.
I think instead of karma we should have an activity and age metric, a badge or something showing how many months/years your account has existed, and an activity metric like posts&comments/day so that it's easy to tell an old, regularly active account from a young account that is spamming a a bunch of comments per day.
Nope, it's fine the way it is right now. if its on the front page good. if not people gotta earn there upvotes. Karma whoreing makes it a competion for everyone. Everyone will be out for themselves and it will turn into reddit.
No, it's not necessary. Who cares who contributes a lot? If a user cares about karma, then they should just stay at Reddit. We don't need this to be a Reddit clone.
I would say something akin to what the name "karma" implies, but not something that can be farmed or botted. Almost like a rating that could factor in multiple different stats; like age of account, posts and/or comments per day, the overall positive/negative rating of said comments, post size, etc... And, it could all be consolidated into some sort of percentage and history graph or something. It would have to be actively developed and debated on to what works and doesn't work.
What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.
The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.
By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.
It was key to the early days of Reddit's success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
I don't think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can't really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories
I like numbers and statistics so I'd be interested in seeing them here, but it's just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.
This. We can meme on them all day long, and we know they're worthless, but they feel nice. Oldest account had 40k+ because of a sick quilt my grandmother made.
No, and I believe to encourage free expression of opinion, negative score on comments/posts should be hidden. minimum displayed score should be 1. internally it should have impact. Too negative comments/posts should be auto reported to mods to check if they break rules.
Good question. But I'm sure it happens sometimes. (Someone else will do it)
Also, often it is argued that up/downvotes are user based moderation but if you hide that score then it won't work as well, this is where mod can step in to see if the comment/post falls in the grey zone. Or require new rule. Or perhaps shouldn't appear first in results.
I think it'd be silly not to track it, but in the end I don't really care. I also didn't really care about the YouTube downvote thing but people found ways of recoding that data anyway. So why not just support it?
I do think instances should be allowed to configure whether or not it's displayed or how it's requested for their users. Maybe they don't want to dish out the hard numbers but want to expose reputation from bandwidths e.g. anything in the negative is bad but between 0-100 is 'new user' and between 101-1000 is something else etc. But then again someone can make insightful authentic comments that just arent popular which shouldn't negatively affect their experience.
I believe that karma on reddit is a big reason for the repetitive jokes that would often appear in comments instead of meaningful discussions so I don't think lemmy should have karma.
There's already "Reputation Points" so don't we already have that, but by another name? I like this name much better than "karma" by the way. I'm kinda good with what we have. It feels like an echo of some things from Reddit are here without being a total clone. Hopefully it won't influence people toward bad/annoying behavior like on Reddit.
Precisely also great name. I never really cared about total karma on Reddit but having a popular comment on the other hand that is always a good feeling.
I don't think we should. I think we should get rid of (visible) up- and downvotes all together. There are too many online spaces where you can get status from likes or upvotes. Let this be a space without all that.
I love the mastodon approach. Each instance is free to enable this numbers, but by default all numbers of up, down, likes, boosts or retweets are hidden. It makes for such peaceful interactions and stress free browsing. There's no number to track and cause anxiety or anguish.
One problem with karma as implemented by Reddit, if you're using it as a way to identify people whose contributions are highly valued by the community, is that there's no way to distinguish someone who posts a ton of things that sometimes get one or two upvotes from someone who posts a small number of highly-upvoted things or from someone who only occasionally engages with the community but has been on the service for 15 years slowly accumulating karma.
Maybe a ratio or average would be more useful than a raw score. Obviously you could get into the weeds with statistics but to the extent there's any value at all in a "how valued are this user's contributions?" metric, probably best to keep it a simple number.
I think it's nice without. Aside from the karma whoring others have mentioned, I think it'll also make it easier for people to switch instances if one turns to shit, though that may be solved in a future update so you can migrate your account. Still, this is something I really like here. Find out your instance is run by people with ideologies you don't want to associate with? Just switch to another one.
(Potential migration stuff:) Keeping posts and comments would be nice, though now that I think about it, that could also be used by people to fill accounts on their own instance, migrate, and thus flood other insurances (depending on how it's implemented, maybe I'm thinking wrong).
Well, I digress. I like it this way where no one feels the need to get as many useless points as possible ^^
Given the toxicity and karma farming approach taken on Reddit, along with the emphasis on populism over thoughtful discourse, it's ultimately harmful to the quality of content posted.
I dont care about karma but i do like to see a users history, something i apparently cant do on mlem. Not sure if thats site-wide or just this app. Without that i wouldnt be able to confidently use the buy-sell communities that i did on reddit like knife_swap or watchexchange.
It has some kind of points, which is all I need. Internet points motivate me, and obviously some others too. Chasing karma made me contribute more to reddit than I would have otherwise.
Still, there’s sometimes that 3rd or 4th comment from the top that isn’t just a dumb joke and actually has the real answer. Without voting, that would just be totally lost among the thousands of other comments. I’m pro karma. I mostly didn’t care for the big subs but in smaller ones where real questions and answers are happening, voting is really helpful for figuring out who is talking out of their ass. It’s not perfect, but it helps.
Please no, no karma, nobody needs another dopamine addiction. Being able to positively mark good comments is helpful, but it shouldn't influence anything - only positive reinforcement.
I think it should, but perhaps it shouldn't be as prominent as on Reddit, and maybe it should be called something more boring, like "post vote sum" or something, to make people place less importance on it.
Edit: would love some input as to why this suggestion is being downvoted. ^Or is this just an example of the circleherky behavior you were all convinced was because of karma...?^