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?
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.
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 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.
I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.
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.
Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.
I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.
Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for “Funny”, “Insightful”, etc, and one of those flags could be “Gild” that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by “Helpful” or “Funny” based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
No karma!
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.
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.
I’d say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO
I’d rather not. You’ll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.
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.
Slashdot.org still exists. They just don’t have a slashdot effect anymore.
