Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes? I always just said what I wanted and used the karma to determine how popular of an opinion it was, so pretty much exactly how Lemmy works now. I don’t think I ever looked at my overall account karma on Reddit.
Yes. It can also trick you into thinking a reactionary opinion is actually a popular one. For example in my country, ireland, there’s been a few incidents were people of different nationalities have done unsavoury things caught on camera. This usually results of the comment section of the ireland sub to have a debate about whether there’s too many immigrants in the country. Whichever side gets more upvotes is widely perceived to have “won” and bystanders will in turn adopt that position.
I don’t think I’ve ever changed an opinion of mine to go along with the hive mind but the karma system has definitely discouraged me from commenting things because I would been downvoted into oblivion. It’s not worth getting into arguments when you can clearly see people not siding with you.
How does this system solve that? Comments still have vote counts and reactionary comments still make it to the top of threads, there’s just no visible count of total aggregated votes.
You’re correct, the entire system is already in place. The only thing that is currently missing is adding up all of someone’s ‘karma’ from their their posts and having it shown on their profile. Some of the apps already have this implemented since it’s easy to incorporate.
I’m fine being downvoted to oblivion by some anti-good astrotufing campaign, but it’s getting honest, legitimate opinions slid down and out of discussion that feels risky
I’m definitely anti right wing, but that doesn’t automatically make the left right about everything.
What is true about both sides is that some people just wanna look for a fight/argument and dehumanize their political ‘other’. It’s easy dopamine and righteous rage that drives engagement in every human.
Any good faith comment that points this out in an argument and has credible examples is always worth its salt.
I actually like finding out I’m wrong or my information is incomplete/outdated. I don’t care for unfounded opinions in myself or others regardless of how they make me feel!
It did the opposite for me. I see those threads in r/canada or other posts and I’d comment trying to get downvoted because I hated the circle jerking and manipulation of threads with cliché comment chains intent on being dog whistles. I hated karma and somehow ended up with a stupid amount of it.
The big thing for me is that I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve had their accounts stalked and harrassed for saying really mild things. With how many times I’ve read “I read your post history and…” over even the most mild disagreements, I absolutely believe this happens on a regular basis. Dropping an obviously unpopular opinion feels like an easy way to become a victim.
100%. I’d even be ok with getting rid voting mechanisms all together. The comment and responses to it should be indicative of it’s quality instead of some vague numerical value which somehow makes it better than the other because more people voted for it based on their own understanding on how a vote works.
Discussions shouldn’t be about what’s popular. Social media has corrupted our ability to have intelligent discussions because non popular viewpoints aren’t entertained anymore and people with non popular viewpoints don’t want to contribute due to the retaliatory nature of likes/votes.
It’s eroding our ability to reason and we need to stop it.
I mean, it kind of does mean something small, which is credibility. Karma wasn’t ever a flawless way to determine credibility, but it was a decent first pass, like an online ocular patdown.
Uh, no. Lol
It maybe showed popularity. But it was frequently manipulated.
Bro I’ve never for a second thought that gallowboob had any credibility whatsoever and the motherfucker had like, all the KARMA
The biggest issue in some places was, even if your opinion is valid, if it didn’t fit the group speak, it would be downvoted regardless.
It wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
wasn’t really a great indicator if your opinion was popular or not, it was more if it got that groups niche.
… That’s called popular opinion lol.
Of course it matters where you say something. It’s literally no different than IRL.
If I’m on Reddit it’s to Reddit, it’s not to change my vocabulary and content to fit each individual subreddits niche.
Imagine being in a country bar and a table only wants to talk about and listen to rap music. The rest of the place shouldn’t have to bend to their will or create some safe place for them.
That and also many subs wouldn’t allow people to participate if they didn’t have a high enough karma
And that makes sense to some degree. I used to mod a large community on re**it and usually rage bait/flaming/troll accounts got filtered out by our automod which was set to 50 karma iirc. Most communities that use a karma filter have it set really low so farming a lot of karma is really unnecessary
I didn’t. If anything I enjoyed the downvotes sometimes. Your downvotes mean nothing
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That Rick quote is like the wojak where he’s got the smirking mask but is crying behind it. It always cracked me up when I saw people use it. If the downvotes mean nothing, why mention them at all?
Did people actually change what they’d say based on whether or not they thought they’d get upvotes?
I’d argue anyone who did that probably had nothing interesting to say and/or didn’t actually care about what they were saying. Same with the people who complained about downvotes.
/me watches some dude post hateful contrarian bullshit on a light hearted comic.
"It’s not even funny and this shit comic comic has been done before. Quit self promoting on reddit bitch!
Edit: Why am I being down voted!? Fuck you know it’s true! Mods temp banned me apparently. I don’t care I’m never going to block her so I can always down vote!"
Somehow everyone who commented on his parent comment has every comment in their profile down voted for the last 50 comments…
I think you are envisioning something a little more intentional/thought out than it is. We do this socially all the time. You gauge the audience and you adjust what you’re going to say to better fit it. Or to upset them if you’re trolling but that tends to be more deliberate.
I bet if you took your comments from a hobby sub/forum/group/etc. you frequent, and then one from a meme community, you will find your tone and rhetoric are very different. And again this is not a bad thing! You are doing and saying what is appropriate for the context. It is very natural to do. But the point is you probably don’t sit down and calculate your exact wording. We just sort of do it, and our goal is generally to “fit in“ or get some affirmation from the community we are participating in.
Yep. I remember someone asking on a hiking sub about a backpack. It was a very fashionable and heavy canvas pack. I hike a good bit and have never seen a pack like that being used by others in the trails, so I said that I wouldn’t recommend that pack. I think it had like 30-40 down votes. I never gave my opinion on a pack again.
Bro you are welcome to elaborate here I mean what can be so controversial about a fucking backpack
Yeah right. I learned my lesson the first time. No more opinions from me.
:)
I think the karma system on reddit had a real effect on behaviour. What you often found it did was cause people to write comments for the audience of voters instead of for the person they’re responding to. This eliminates personal interaction between users and turns everything into soapboxing. You stop having real conversations with each other, instead it becomes about pandering to votes.
This then also causes people to vote based on this as well. “You’re not saying what the group wants to hear” downvote is the voting behaviour it creates.
This so frigging much. People are not having conversations, they are posturing.
It’s like going into a debate prepared for discussing ideas, and the other debater is going for discussing emotions.
Truly fucked up and patently divisive
Yeah it’s annoying. Things are far more pleasant when people are actually talking to one another, it creates a more human interaction and you don’t get the kind of bad-faith engagement associated with trying to pander to votes. People self-censor far less as a result as well, aside from instance rules.
Yes, and there’s a bit of psychology at play
Reddit just shows one score on the post, it doesn’t show the exact upvote/downvote number. It’s easy to just say “Well everyone else voted this up/down, so I guess I will to”, it encourages group think, by design it’s meant to be an echo chamber.
Imagine you have a divisive opinion, at the end of an hour you have 9 upvotes and 11 downvotes, so it’s at negative one. You’re gonna think you’re being ignored, and others will think you’re unpopular and just downvote you not reading it because it’s “What the group is doing”
Reddit is fucking nightmare
how do people on this site not realize that the points next to your posts affect how your posts are sorted and are literally the exact same system as reddit? am i just so blind that i can actually see the numbers next to my posts or is everyone here just trying to be so anti-reddit they’ll make up bullshit that isn’t reality?
They are talking about karma as a thing you could collect, point totals for all posts added together displayed on your profile. Not the voting mechanism itself.
Lemmy also has this and everyone’s point totals are visible from the API. If you’re not seeing it, that’s because your client is hiding it, not because it doesn’t exist.
The nice thing is though, it’s different for every server and from every server, so unless you follow a convention to say the user’s homeserver vote total is the definitive amount, then there’s no true karma.
My beehaw account is a great example. I made some comments on Lemmy world before it defederated. World and shitjustworks users can still vote on the old comments but they won’t count to my home total, and from Lemmy.world my vote total won’t change for that account significantly from that point. The vote totals on this lemmy.ca account will be different from lemmy.ca, beehaw.org or lemmy.world’s perspectives because the servers defederated can’t see the karma I earned on each comment on the other server, while lemmy.ca can see both.
Downvotes are also disabled on beehaw, so any downvotes won’t affect my total at all but could show on other servers.
Lastly, there are some servers with 40000 accounts and 3 active users (who post and comment), vote botting is feasibly a thing. Imagine if I made a Lemmy server at Rentlar.org and as the admin I made 20000 accounts who upvote me every where I post. I’d be the first user on Lemmy with 1M total votes, but would that mean anything other than I’m a somewhat tech-savvy narcissistic loser? No.
Lemmy also has that bro. Some clients display it and some don’t, but when I click on your name I see that you have 510 total comment score and 0 total post score.
https://i.imgur.com/NxSyRDg_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
I hadn’t thought about it until just now but IDK if that number is accurate. My instance doesn’t have downvotes, so if you view my profile from lemmy.one it might look like I have a higher karma than if you look from lemmy.world, I’m not sure.
Take it all wirh a grain of salt I say
And that system was irrelevant on Reddit just like it is here. You still have a total karma number in the API, every app I have used shows it, even if it is broken right now. Only the default theme on the web page hides the number. The only people who saw value in karma are the people who farmed it and the people who bitch about the people who farmed it. Either way, making posts that get a lot of upvotes specifically to get a lot of upvotes happens here just like I does on Reddit so idk what this OP is trying to say because they’re farming karma lol.
There were many subreddits that did not allow participation unless someone had a karma over a certain threshold. For many of them the threshold was pretty low, only meant to stop brand new accounts and trolls, but still.
Additionally, the “people who farmed it” often did so because a reddit account with a high karma score was literally worth money to adspammers and people running bots.
The karma system contributed to what made reddit bad.
Karma is the total of upvotes and downvotes a user receives over time not just single posts and comments. It leads to discrimantory moderation and users tend to whore themselves out for upvotes to boast.
Ever heard of gallowboob?
Arguably one difference is that on lemmy it’s just a straight up sum AFAIK, while on reddit there are some algorithms attached to tweak things so you can’t lose vast amounts of karma from a single shit comment and such.
Reddit bad lemmy good, you are not allowed to say otherwise.
Edit: Bruh people on lemmy don’t get sarcasm either 😭
You can on reddit say what you want. If you really care about the number next to your name you’re just a victim
I never changed my opinion just so I get more karma on reddit either.
Lemmy’s system is no different from Reddit’s and my original comment was sarcastic. I’ve noticed sarcastic posts without /s get downvoted more easily on Lemmy for whatever reason.
The initial point of the karma system was to push to the top of discussions relevant information while the shitposts were put at the bottom. It works sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t.
I think, honestly, politics is the biggest issue here when it comes to the karma system and it doesn’t work well at all within it, but for many other things it’s actually a decent system and a good way to find relevant information in a thread without reading through 500 pages on a forum or something
Just my 2 pennies
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You can, but there’s absolutely no reason to think the community population will ignore it, once it has its own value the karma whores will arise. People literally sell high karma accounts for real money. You can’t ignore the karma farmers when they are all around you and you can’t ignore the fact that it shapes real user behavior toward hive-mind dribble. Keep karma to the Gods, it is not for mortals to toy with.
Literally seen 0 people asking for karma system
Also karma on Reddit is basically irrelevant. The only place it matters is in automoderation removing posts and comments for users under a certain level of karma.
People will do strange things rather extensively to watch arbitrary numbers go up. Especially children.
Getting upvotes maybe, but nobody pays attention to their aggregate karma.
Posting comics on Reddit, I found it a quick way to see how well I made something and what people generally liked. Eventually though I started to become a little skeptical of the numbers, and hated having to play this game where those numbers might be better when posting at different times and different days. I couldn’t help but feel like some of them were bought initially to heat, or boost their posts.
I started to absolutely loathe those numbers, but I don’t know what you can do to replace them.
Which is honestly freaking dumb. Sure you can do it with a big community but it will speed up the hivemind and alienate new users and frankly did nothing to curb bots because bots just farmed karma elsewhere on a sub where it was open by spamming posts and comments. And then went right back on the “threshold” subs.
You need Karma, in so many subs. Not only comments karma, also posts karma and all that stupid shit
I once wanted to post a meme on r/memes. My post got removed because I needed a lot more karma (my estimation was that I needed 1k each for both comments and posts but it wouldn’t actually tell me how much I needed). I REALLY hope that doesn’t appear here. It just blocks people from making and sharing content with others.
I mean, upvotes are counted and tracked so how is that different than karma?
On reddit, if your karma is too low you’re not allowed to participate in most communities.
