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 think it’s good for dealing with communities that don’t want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.
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.
What’s preventing GPT-based bots to earn karma by writing real-looking comments?
The future of the internet really seems like a dark one…
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.
I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit
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.
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. 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.
No karma!
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.
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.
for what purpose?
i genuinly cant think of any reason other than encourage reposting bots
personally i dont care at all about karma.
so long as the upvote/downvote system works, regarding post (and comment) visibility etc.
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.
No. I’d rather no up voting/downvoting on comments at all. It discourages discussion.
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.
Mfers arguing whether reddits equivalent of a captcha will affect social interaction.
I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.
I liked my magic internet points number, man.
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.
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.
