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?

  • TitanLaGrange@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    No.

    But if it did I’d prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.

    It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.

    So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.

    Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!

    In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.

    Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my ‘FunDisasterLemmy’ instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn’t relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.

    It might even make sense to let communities have customizable voting. For example, a ‘ChangeMyMind’ community could have a ‘Did Change My Mind’ and ‘Did Not Change My Mind’ vote option (vs the practice in the Reddit sub of replying with a frustratingly-difficult-to-type character), or YTA, NTA, EAA, etc. (though in that case I suppose that’s more of a poll option)