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?
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.
It shouldn’t. Karma encourages the vices we’ve seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.
The biggest problem with karma is how it leads to a hivemind.
Couldn’t agree more. I also feel people just say shit that they don’t believe in just because it’s the popular opinion.
I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.
Nope, no need for karma whores.
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 like not having karma. It should be about content and context, not regurgitation.
I agree with this. And I’d like to add that the karma system has made a lot of people addicted to “winning” points. I like this site because it’s simple, and it isn’t contributing to the addictive nature of Social Media. This site isn’t conventionally nice looking, but it definitely works well, and I like that.
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 said it better than I did.
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.
Perfect description, hands down.
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.
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.
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.
So you’re one of those Reddit ‘comedians’ who post the puns and get upvoted to the top of threads?
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 a hard no from me too.
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.
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.
“The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content.”
Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?
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.
No, absolutely not. It’s too easily abused for people who cares about it, doesn’t add any value to people who don’t.
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 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.
It was proof that people liked what I had to say, and that I’d been funny and interesting for at least twelve years running.
Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.
I agree with you 100%, we don’t want to make the same mistakes twice.
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!
