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Lack of Overall Karma Count (Less Pressure?) (dataterm.digital)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There are upvotes for posts and upvotes for comments but on lemmy you're not reminded of an overall running karma total. The lack of this count makes me feel like there's a lot less pressure for every post or comment to be an absolute banger, witty, smart or something along those lines.

On reddit I would lurk a lot because I was none of those things but I feel like I can engage more now.

What do you think? Do you think it's a good thing, a bad thing or perhaps do you feel indifferent?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I generally think that not having a karma count is overall beneficial. Based on all the negative outcomes of the variations we've seen in other services (Facebook's like, Twitter's follower count and blue check, Reddit's karma), I feel like overall it degenerates into negative pressure that causes people to choose clout and popularity over genuine, meaningful engagement.

That being said, I am not a member of a marginalized community and have not experienced the positive effects it can have, so I have no expertise in this area. Take my words above with that in mind. Using something like karma to keep out trolls and protect community members is a very valid positive use case. Using it not as an indicator of clout but rather an indication of safety or empathy (general "niceness") is, I think, a beneficial use of a karma-like tracker. There are good reasons to have a karma count.

Perhaps a better implementation of "karma" might be a metric not based solely on likes or upvotes, but rather something that is conferred by each individual community, and shared by like-minded communities. That way, the karma would be qualified in various spheres of communities as opposed to a site-wide popularity contest. That would make it difficult for people in a troll forum, who get lots of karma from like-minded trolls, to use that karma to get into other communities where their karma would be considered "bad karma". If I, as a mod, looked at a prospective user and saw that all their karma came from communities that are antithetical to mine, I could assume they'd probably not be a good fit for my sub.

If there is to be the idea of karma here, I hope that it would be more nuanced than just "this person knows how to get people to engage with them". I personally am not wanting karma to become a thing here, at least the way it was implemented on Reddit. I don't believe that the majority of people are capable of using it primarily for beneficial reasons as it currently works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I find that I've had more meaningful engagement within decetralised spaces than the centralised ones. Sadly the corpos the type of engagement doesn't seem to matter too much as long as it's engagement on their site and not someone else's. I felt that same pressure to be honest.

You're right about the good use cases, it's nice within the marginalised communities / subreddits but outside of them it's not so great. Sometimes you want to engage in other communities in peace as well so I guess it comes down to moderation but I understand the karma points is a barrier to entry for trolls.

Community level point counts might not be too bad tbh because like you said, it would be a way of stopping people from using other communties that might not have the best intentions to farm karma so they're not in minus numbers. To be honest, a count did span across a site it would be a nice feature to have a breakdown as to what communities that positive and negative karma comes from..