Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.
Just like on Reddit, I don’t care. As long as it’s not tied to my ability to interact with the community then let them have their silly internet points.
One annoying thing on some subreddits was moderators auto-removing your posts unless you had a certain amount of karma.
The throttles are really useful. But I agree on the first post and the removals.
But it influences the community itself, doesn’t it? If you have a bunch of parrots saying what they think others want to hear suddenly you have a lot less real interactions and way more “reddit moments”… I like how mastodon did it and maybe lemmy should also provide the option to hide likes/dislikes alltogether.
And the window of correct opinion keeps getting narrower. Any time there’s a chance to gatekeep morality, someone out there wants to prove they’re the most <whatever>.
On any of the popular subs, no one’s going to read your comment in good faith. They’ll see what they wanted you to say and just reply to that.
That is a great point. I definitely don’t enjoy the “hive mind.”
I don’t really care about karma or reputation points. However, I really enjoy having a community where you can upvote and downvote.
Upvoting and downvoting is fine, because it’s different than having a profile-wide “score”, which provides an incentive that transcends making quality posts, and instead encourages shit like reposts in order to farm points. It also perpetuates a fear of making “hot takes” and other crap because you might lose your precious points. It leads to echo chambering.
I never cared about karma points at all. I just said what I was thinking. Only annoying thing on Reddit was when you didn’t have any karma at all.
People begin downvoting your post now, because you don’t care. lol
I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.
I’ve seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.
I think having no reputation point is a good thing, it gives no incentive to post low-effort content just to get reputation points.
I do not want to worry about downvotes
There’s Lemmy-servers that have turned off down-votes. You can only get upvoted or ignored.
yup, I started on Beehaw and realized I didn’t miss the downvotes and that it made interacting with comments sections feel much more in good faith. Later moved to my current instance after specifically looking for small instances with applications and no downvotes but federated with (almost) everyone. I know downvotes are still there for most other users but I don’t see them and it’s freeing!
A big shout out to Lemmy.one. I signed up not knowing but love the fact now. Down votes don’t add to the discussion. And posts and comments that are in poor taste should just be reported. Ignoring poorly made comments and posts is the best way to extinguish them. It forces the writer to improve their input if they care about the up votes. Down votes just make the user give up in wanting to contribute at all. Lemmy is about contribution. For now it is anyway.
Just look at the reddit accounts in recent years whose goal was to accrue as many downvotes as possible. Contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.
A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It’s easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.
No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are mostly a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a “good vibes only, no criticism allowed” type of environment.
Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn’t have a broken social credit system.
There are posts that contain despicable information/news but are useful to know, and I always struggled between upvoting or not voting since downvoting would remove karma from OP.
Downvotes aren’t intended for the subject of the news, but for OP for making the post. If you hate the subject, I guess the correct action is to express it in the comments, or give an upvote if someone else already did.
I just wanna see some memes
I think karma could in some ways be fun, but overall was more of a liability than an asset for Reddit. I’m glad Lemmy didn’t have it. Reduces karmawhoring incentives
I think not having karma tells the user that they don’t have to care about posting the “right” things. This is better, as I think the karma system of Reddit promoted conformity, as people wanted to gamify their experience on the site, and even created a weird economy of people selling high karma accounts to advertisers or whoever wanted karma for whatever reason.
So yeah, I prefer not having visible karma.
I would prefer a platform without karma or reputation. The way reputation works on Kbin isn’t great anyway. Downvotes lower it but upvotes don’t raise it. My rep is low because most people don’t boost.
A karma/rep system can disincentivize participation as well. I don’t think it’s necessary to keep trolls at bay.
The way reputation works on Kbin isn’t great anyway.
That’s because it has a bug. They changed upvotes from boost -> like to be compatible with Lemmy. The reputation calculation hasn’t been updated yet. It probably will be soon. Might even have a PR already.
There’s a bug filed but no PR because a decision hasn’t been made on how to deal with it.
After reading your comment I realized I didn’t know there was a reputation mechanic and what boost even does. Is there a faq somewhere for this type of thing?
I think boost is like a retweet? I’ll look around to see if anyone ever explained it all.
From reading an earlier thread, I believe the boost feature makes more sense when you think about federating with Mastadon which has a reblog thing going on. So you’d get a boost to your rep if someone shared your content on mastodon.
Additionally, Kbin is planning to change the rep system to be based on up and down votes instead—it just isn’t a priority right now. Something something check the GitHub for details.
i hate karma .
Oh look it’s someone impersonating one of the biggest pieces of shit on reddit
Me too.
I like that the total values of both votes are shown. It’s better than the way reddit has it at least.
Please keep it every other site has removed the idea of a downvote and here we got total and we can see up/downvotes
Agreed, Reddit used to show up/down counts but got rid of it and I thought that was a stupid choice on their part. Reddit also did other weird manipulations to the upvote count on posts which I’m glad we don’t have here.
People tend to upvote and believe anything that already has a lot of upvotes. Seeing downvotes is a good red flag to warn users to not blindly believe everything they see with positive karma.
I think the current system is harder to manipulate than reddit
It is still possible through the API (for now), and maybe the official website, to view the percentage of upvotes to downvotes, but not the number of downvotes themselves
I think it’s overall a good feature, but it’s also a bit unfortunate that you can’t vote based on the score that you think something should have, without that vote carrying an additional (unintended) meaning.
Like if someone gives a poorly thought out but otherwise good faith opinion. Maybe it has a score of -50 but it only deserves -10. Now my upvote might be seen as proof that at least one other discussion participant supports that opinion, when that’s not actually the case.
It is weird that we vote like that. I find myself bringing a lot of good faith comments back up from 0 not because I agree with it, but because I think it is a comment worth 1 upvote lol
I don’t care for Karma-farming, but I liked having some way to tell if someone was a real community member or a throw-away account. I liked that there were some subreddits that wouldn’t let you post if you had low karma because it helped hold back the trolls.
It also deterred real posters, like a lot of overly ruled subs did.
I hate gamification of… Everything, but if it’s just “oh hey I’ve been here for X years and at some point I got 5000 upvotes / 800 downvotes, that’s cool I guess”, I’m kinda for it actually.
It’s like with videogame achievements. They’re not super important for most people, but sometimes it’s nice to look back at the stuff you’ve played or what you had to overcome. Some are addicted to it too. Real life doesn’t give you much satisfaction in this way.
On reddit it was pretty useful to be able to check if an account had -100 karma before deciding whether to interact with them.
