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 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 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.
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.
Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.
I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.
Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I’m not posting or commenting into the void.
I’m not overly interested in my grand total.
How would this even be implemented? What’s to prevent one user from generating massive amounts of karma on their own instance?
I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit
NO.
No, karma isn’t necessarily an indication of good quality. It’s also easy to boost your karma on a decentralized social media by creating accounts on multiple instances and upvote your content
I think it’s good for dealing with communities that don’t want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.
I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons
I think post karma and comment karma are very different things. Post karma is not as meaningful to me, because all it’s really telling you is how badly someone wants to be a karma hog. But comment karma shows a little about someone’s engagement and longevity. But only a little. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.
No internet points, please!
I say no, it was ripe for abuse, with karma farming bots which get sold to entities looking to influence and astroturf a platform.
