There is already a total count of up- and downvotes, but please never add karma to Lemmy. We don’t want to deal with karma farmers and minimal karma requirements to post. I don’t care about the moderation issues because karma brought more harm than good. Please never add that bloody dreadful thing to Lemmy. I already saw a bunch of people supporting adding karma to Lemmy, which will turn Lemmy into a cheap Reddit clone and karma-farming hell. Please, never add karma to Lemmy. I beg you. No more karma hell.
I was actually about to make a post about this, addressing this issue, but more glad this is already up.
I’m not a fan of any karma system, regardless of platform. People really tie themselves to reactions, likes, upvotes, downvotes .etc to where it cripples them. Nothing they say or do becomes authentic and natural anymore. They say or do things for the specific purpose to get something to validate what they’re saying or doing.
And it creates this frustrating system where we end up having to deal with farmers. Reddit is ingrained with it, because we’ve seen it one too many times. People reposting junk, they get thousands of upvotes and they aren’t held accountable for it. We’ve also seen people perform downvote brigades, hence coining the term ‘downvoted to oblivion’. Where, people proactively downvote every post and comment someone has made because of some spite and out of emotion in regards to an opinion that was said.
And they know the effects of these things, because we tie ourselves way too much into it. I’d like to not see scoring or karma systems everywhere. They do nothing but encourage the worst out of anyone to exploit them. They’re meaningless, it’s just an internet toy that people play with when so many platforms try so hard to describe their importance. But in the end, it’s just a stupid internet toy that serves NO purpose.
While I agree with most points I’d like to give a reason why a voting system can be a good idea. It is a way to filter interest or engagement, posts or comments that got a reaction are likely more interesting to other users as well. And another argument is that it gives perceived value to an account, meaning people will not spamm accounts and banning someone has a perceived consequence. I don’t moderate any community so I don’t know if that is effective but I feel like thats a reason for keeping a version of that around