this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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I think one of the major benefits Lemmy has over Reddit is the intentional lack of user karma. I think, on balance, that entire dynamic was more harmful than helpful in the long run. Allowing voting on posts - but not aggregating votes across all comments and posts - still allows community sentiment to be expressed towards comments and conversations, but at the same time prevents the sort of popularity contest bullshit that became so prevalent on Reddit after its nascent years.
Agreed. Karma was fun when Reddit began because it was truly useless internet points, but quickly fell off as soon as people got too serious about it. Buying/selling accounts with high karma, rules about only posting when you have a karma threshold, and of course the endgame now of buying stock if you have high enough karma. It's just easier to throw away the whole concept here.
I never understood that.. Why did people want karma points? Was it anything more than having 'liked' posts? There's no real value. It's like when my BIL used to give all the kids brownie points for getting salsa or reading a book.
If you gamify something people with addiction and addiction-adjacent problems will inevitably interact with it in the gamified way. This was the first state of the karma system harming the site.
Then in the second stage once karma started getting more "serious" (preventing users from posting/commenting and being used as an "authenticity" check- what led to farmed and sold accounts) which led to a further breakdown of the karma system.
The underlying issue is despite being an absolutely useless measure in reality- the site itself ascribed value to them and caused people with (what we'd probably refer to as bad) economic incentives to act on that behavior then rationally acted.