There is already a total count of up- and downvotes, but please never add karma to Lemmy. We don’t want to deal with karma farmers and minimal karma requirements to post. I don’t care about the moderation issues because karma brought more harm than good. Please never add that bloody dreadful thing to Lemmy. I already saw a bunch of people supporting adding karma to Lemmy, which will turn Lemmy into a cheap Reddit clone and karma-farming hell. Please, never add karma to Lemmy. I beg you. No more karma hell.
Lmao… The TOTAL karma one had was never important. They will still look at how many upvotes is next to their comment, because that’s a measure of attention. They still want attention.
It won’t make a difference if you can see your total karma or not, ppl will farm upvotes.
I’m sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It’s called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone’s profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn’t being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.
[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that’s a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]
I’m sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It’s called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone’s profile in kbin.
kbin is rather new to the scene afaik, so I wouldn’t say reputation has been a part of it since the beginning, but the upvote/downvote records have probably been public since the beginning (idk), so calculating some karma equivalent with whatever preferred metric you wanted was always technically possible, but not socially relevant since average people wouldn’t do such.
Reputation is a kbin specific thing
Agree. Useless feature and promotes trash content.
I think that karma is an obstacle to free thought. People prefer to remain silent instead of expressing their opposing opinions while declaring ideas that are more in line with the prevailing opinion of the community than their own in order to gain karma.
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Yup this is exactly why people like it. Nobody disagrees and when they do, you just downvote them to hell.
I think it’s primitive.
You guys are forgetting about spam accounts, toxic individuals, trolls, etc. I think they need to take into account karma but just not show it.
How? You can’t see the difference between a troll and anyone who has an opinion that is different from the norm just by looking at downvotes. This just builds echo chambers.
I was actually about to make a post about this, addressing this issue, but more glad this is already up.
I’m not a fan of any karma system, regardless of platform. People really tie themselves to reactions, likes, upvotes, downvotes .etc to where it cripples them. Nothing they say or do becomes authentic and natural anymore. They say or do things for the specific purpose to get something to validate what they’re saying or doing.
And it creates this frustrating system where we end up having to deal with farmers. Reddit is ingrained with it, because we’ve seen it one too many times. People reposting junk, they get thousands of upvotes and they aren’t held accountable for it. We’ve also seen people perform downvote brigades, hence coining the term ‘downvoted to oblivion’. Where, people proactively downvote every post and comment someone has made because of some spite and out of emotion in regards to an opinion that was said.
And they know the effects of these things, because we tie ourselves way too much into it. I’d like to not see scoring or karma systems everywhere. They do nothing but encourage the worst out of anyone to exploit them. They’re meaningless, it’s just an internet toy that people play with when so many platforms try so hard to describe their importance. But in the end, it’s just a stupid internet toy that serves NO purpose.
While I agree with most points I’d like to give a reason why a voting system can be a good idea. It is a way to filter interest or engagement, posts or comments that got a reaction are likely more interesting to other users as well. And another argument is that it gives perceived value to an account, meaning people will not spamm accounts and banning someone has a perceived consequence. I don’t moderate any community so I don’t know if that is effective but I feel like thats a reason for keeping a version of that around
I can see how many points I have on every post. I can see my total points.
How’s that different?
Can’t say I agree. I miss karma. Not because I want it, because I don’t care. But that imaginary internet point sure drives a lot of content - and even repeat content has a purpose to drive platform growth. I had like 1,000 subs and FREQUENTLY saw something for the first time that the tHiS iS a RePoSt people came out of the woodwork for.
I also miss karma a bit. I can live without it but seeing a score is nice. I will behave the same with or without here on Lemmy though. For some reason, I’ve really found my voice here on Lemmy and am much more active then when I was on Reddit.
Still, that being said, I do feel a boost when I look at my comments and see that number lol.
Don’t worry, reposting will happen with or without karma! 😜
Not a bad thing imo. Not everyone spends all day on the internet. I probably spend more time than most people and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a meme that’s new to me and half the comments are bitching about it being a repost.
Yeah, I recognized a lot of reposts, but also posts that apparently had been going around for months or years but it was my first time seeing them, even though I was on reddit for half of every day.
I think it’s a very bad idea to have karma as well. It shaped reddits entire conversation structure to be all about karma farming, since people think a high karma number means higher status in the community.
I don’t see any positives with it. Let people’s comments stand on their own for what they say, not because they have high karma.
Karma/reputation is currently a thing here, it just isn’t rendered in Lenny’s UI. Mommy and Mlem for iOS both show totals on the user profile page.
Karma sucks, i nuked my reddit accounts every 6 months to stop myself getting hooked on it
I’d say karma was a way Reddit created to create engagement. Many people commented random crap or even reposted stuff to gain karma.
I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up
I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow
What we don’t need is karma done badly, and there’s a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it
Hear hear 👏 Don’t post for the glory.
The content you’re putting into the fediverse should be for everyone. You no longer own it.
I also hope awards are never added. Reddit had sooooo many and it was really annoying in the end with all the flashy, distracting “awards” on the comment sections.
I think the fact you said you don’t care about moderation issues kind of shows the disconnect. On reddit, karma was a crucial way to moderate. I think something similar is a good idea for federated replacements.
That’s also part of why votes need to be public, because how else would you know an instance wasn’t inflating it’s numbers. And the total number of votes would always need to at least be accessible on the backend to order properly. We can’t just get rid of these parts and still keep core functionality working. Sure this can be hidden from the user, but it’s not feasible to throw out.
Edit: I want to clarify that I’m open to suggestions. Please respond with how you think the system could avoid abuse and keep post ordering without a way of auditing/accounting for votes. I haven’t been able to think of one personally.
