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?
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.
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Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities.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.
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!
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.
This
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.
I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.
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.
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.
Why? They are useless and some people go crazy about them.
Why should we copy the bad if we are trying to build something better
I’d rather not. You’ll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.
Lolz crazy. 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.
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.
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 have heard of Slashdot before, but never thought of its karma system. Well I learned something today I guess
Slashdot.org still exists. They just don’t have a slashdot effect anymore.
No Karmq ＝ No Karma farming…
