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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] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I completely get where you're coming from, in that having overall karma counts can lead to unhealthy behaviors, like viewing it as a competition, indicator of status, or game score you have to maximize, which in turn can lead to karma farming or lurking or low quality but high-reward posting, but I do also think karma can serve useful purposes as well.

As a trans person online, I have to deal with trolls and sea lioning fairly often, and one of the most useful and accurate ways to identify a troll who isn't worth engaging with is a low karma account. It means that it's likely either an alt account that they use purely because they know they are doing something that's harmful, or that they just spend all of their time hurting people and stirring controversy and so can't even find any place on the internet that will actually like them and reward them with karma as a consequence. That's why a lot of subreddits is especially ones for marginalized people have a minimum-karma requirement.

I'm not sure which matters more, but I think the behaviors that the existence of an overall karma count serves to foster our typically far less pernicious than the ones it serves to highlight and help people avoid.

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

Regarding the online abuse in regards to being trans, same here. I had this problem on twitter GC / TERF pileons so shinigami eyes was quite useful to have. When trolls learn you're trans it's like low hanging fruit to them so I get what you mean with low karma accounts being blocked from engaging in a community

Lemmy is in it's early days so they may actually add an overall count with a similar safety feature in the future or additional safety features for communities to use. If the Lemmy devs don't create something to help with this then it's possible that someone might write a bot to help with moderation as automod and the likes were quite popular on Reddit. I'm speaking from my own experiences here but I find that over time as a mod or admin who is a marginalised person, you tend to become friends with mods and admins from other marginalised communities within the fediverse and get a headsup on who's doing the damage and where before the abuse is aimed at the rest of the community. The fediverse is currently mostly reliant on these teams for user safety so for now, connecting with other communities and talking to each other is one of the best tools we have until more features are developed.

Thank you for your response btw, it has made me think about what Lemmy might need so communities can keep each othe safe. Some Lemmy instances will tolerate abuse like that and leave it upto the mods to govern their own communities but we've never been a fan of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate or TERFs here at DATATERM or any of the other fedi spaces run by @revengeday@[email protected] .