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?
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Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities.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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.
Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.
It leads to garbage tier repost trash.
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 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.
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.
Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.
That is a good point. I put a long indepth and very heavily researched post with a heap of links to sources on one of my local subs on there. It was downvoted to oblivion because people didnt like it. You have changed my mind as I was about to say I was in favour of the karma system, but you are right, it does need to work differently
