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.
Can’t say I agree. I miss karma. Not because I want it, because I don’t care. But that imaginary internet point sure drives a lot of content - and even repeat content has a purpose to drive platform growth. I had like 1,000 subs and FREQUENTLY saw something for the first time that the tHiS iS a RePoSt people came out of the woodwork for.
I also miss karma a bit. I can live without it but seeing a score is nice. I will behave the same with or without here on Lemmy though. For some reason, I’ve really found my voice here on Lemmy and am much more active then when I was on Reddit.
Still, that being said, I do feel a boost when I look at my comments and see that number lol.
Not a bad thing imo. Not everyone spends all day on the internet. I probably spend more time than most people and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a meme that’s new to me and half the comments are bitching about it being a repost.
The Reddthat instance that I’m on also has disabled down voting which I’m also all for. On Reddit, down voting very often became a tool for vocalizing what you disagreed with rather than a low effort or inappropriate post.
I am MAJORLY against disabling downvoting. This results in VERY toxic comments and content being pushed to the front and click bating content, which is what was witnessed on YouTube and Facebook, and is still a major problem. This is because youtube and other sites measure popularity of content not just by upvotes but by interaction. If you click on and/or comment on something, that’s interaction. Youtube does not care about the quality of content and comments, so long as it is interacted with and shared. This means that inflammatory comments and content and click bate get lots of angry comments and rage clicks and click bait gets clicked because it’s click bait and it registers and popular content that will generate lots of interaction so it gets pushed to the forefront. On reddit this kind of content gets largely weeded out by a quality check, downvotes. While no system is perfect, this allows the community to say “no, ok, just because I clicked on this and maybe even left a comment, this is NOT good content, and should not be shared with others.” It also is a natural scam and spam filter that allows the community to quickly shoot down anything that is obviously spam.
Youtube comments were extremely toxic for this exact reason for a long time after the change. They had to implement a lot of changes to help reduce that toxicity, and probably went back to considering the downvotes despite not showing the count.
I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up
I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow
What we don’t need is karma done badly, and there’s a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it
I’m a Reddit mod. I absolutely needed to filter users by karma AND account age. The amount of bot posts is exhausting and impossible to keep up with without a filtering method. If the fediverse continues to grow, something will need to be implemented here too.
Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.
First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?
As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:
For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.
Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.
Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.
Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)
I’ve mentioned it in a another post but I don’t want any visible points at all. I think the counts for upvotes, downvotes, etc should all be hidden.