No Stupid Questions

Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.

That's a hard no from me too.

Upvotes and downvotes exist to filter bad content. Anything that tracks points per user will just lead to toxic karma whoring and bots, as demonstrated by Reddit.

In my opinion, Lemmy shouldn't turn into a Reddit clone, it should learn from Reddit's plethora of mistakes.

Karma ends up being the reason people post content - just look at Reddit and you see it; repost bots, people karma-whoring in comments, posting the same tired shit over and over just because it gets upvotes, etc.

We shouldn't need gamification to drive engagement. We're not a single corporate entity trying to drive profits. Early internet forums managed for a long time to get people participating because they wanted to participate, not because they felt the need to make an ultimately meaningless number go up.

Personally, my favorite thing about Lemmy (vs. Kbin specifically) is that there's no account-level karma equivalent. I would be very disappointed if it was ever added.

No, karma turned Reddit into a hive mind. Everyone knew what everyone expected in each community and would push people to stay in line in order to not get downvoted.

Not just no, but heck no, and no algorithm either. Karma at a glance doesn't tell you anything about quality. High karma users can be anything from insightful posters to inflammatory shitstains to literally not even human. It's not useful for keeping new accounts from spamming - new accounts are created every single day en masse for the sole purpose of accruing karma by any means for the distinct purpose of being sold to spammers.

Karma also tanks discussions - every slightly big Reddit post is flooded with people repeating the same stupid "in"-jokes and puns that were funny 7 years ago by people and bots trying to boost their karma. The first few comment threads in every post become absolutely useless at best, and at worst, bots and bad faith actors clog up the pipes with ongoing spam efforts and purposely deceitful and manipulative misinformation campaigns that are demonstrably harmful to society.

Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities. I personally think that while Lemmy acts as a great alternative to Reddit there's no compelling argument for trying to make Lemmy an exact copy of Reddit. Lemmy doesn't need to be a one-to-one mirror image of a website that we're all literally fleeing because it's a giant shit pile. IMHO.

I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.

A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.

Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That's a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.

I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn't be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.

It shouldn't. Karma encourages the vices we've seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.

No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc.. I've actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn't have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.

I am personally indifferent. Never really cared on all my accounts on Reddit.

I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.

Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor's desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.

Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!

Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.

Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.

Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.

But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.

You know what's funny? I think I voted more on comments here than my several years of reddit already. Having votes kept to individual comments instead of tallied up in your profile like this just feels better to me.

You can easily accumulate karma just by saying what everyone obviously wants you to say. I have 4 Reddit accounts with 6 figure karma and trust me, unless it's about a topic I am familiar with, what I have to say isn't any more insightful than some other person who has no or negative karma.

for what purpose?

i genuinly cant think of any reason other than encourage reposting bots

personally i dont care at all about karma.

so long as the upvote/downvote system works, regarding post (and comment) visibility etc.

I'd rather not. You'll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.

No, karma isn't necessarily an indication of good quality. It's also easy to boost your karma on a decentralized social media by creating accounts on multiple instances and upvote your content

I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.

The karma system, as we former redditors know it, is susceptible to abuse (especially on a decentralized platform), results in a drive to repost popular content repeatedly, and is a poor representation of quality contributions. My vote would be no.

No. We don't need to make Reddit again. Let's do something else.

ABSOLUTELY NO!!!

Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.

Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won't post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.

I like diversity of opinion. I don't want facebook, I don't want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.

Anyone here old enough to remember slashdot? I liked their karma system. The maximum a post could get was +5, and I think the minimum was -1. I don't quite recall the details, but it was pretty effective. People didn't shamelessly karma farm because there wasn't any point. If you are at +5 there's nowhere else to go.

No

Why? They are useless and some people go crazy about them.

Why should we copy the bad if we are trying to build something better

No

I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO

It leads to garbage tier repost trash.

Nope, no need for karma whores.

Edit to explain: The karma system reddit has, is obviously detrimental to the quality of content. Some people see it as a game, and play for karma, rather than actually posting something that is meaningful to them.

Others put to much significance into it, and get bummed if they are not upvoted, because they think karma equals popular.

No. This isn't reddit. Want Karma? Go to reddit.

No thank you.

No internet points, please!

No karma!

No, absolutely not. It's too easily abused for people who cares about it, doesn't add any value to people who don't.

Karma ruined Reddit. Let's not repeat the same mistake here.

We don't need people Karma Whoring.

Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.

I don't think so. I never payed attention to karma or gold or gifts at all. Tbh I never understood them and personally don't feel a need for any of it.

I never saw the point, all it ever did was make people karma farm.

Lolz that's crazy... we should only take good ideas from Reddit.

I'm happy that most folks (in this thread, at least) seem to be of a similar mindset.

I struggled with Karma for a month, then I jumped on a few new 'DadJokes' and copy pasted a couple of puns - masses of Karma meant I could carry on trolling.

Votes are the way to push good/relevant comments upwards or downwards - and without value outside the thread, they'll only be used for that... as it should be.

I had an 8 year old account on reddit (deleted today) and had accumulated a decent amount of karma. that being said I didn't even notice there wasn't any karma here. the voting system is nice to see which comments are popular but there's no need for it sitewide.

I worked for a couple of years in the Tech Startup space not long ago and in little companies like that everybody does kinda work with everybody else, so I did work together with the Digital Marketing side too.

Anchored in what I learned there I have a feeling that Karma is often used as a sort of buy-in and gamification strategy.

On the first part (not sure if buy-in is the right expression but stay with me here), it gives people something that feels like a personal asset: you've put time into making posts and you got this "stuff" from it, which intellectually is just a number by emotionally is something that is "yours" and you got by putting time and work into it, and this "stuff" is non-transferable so you're less likely to leave because you don't want to loose it.

On the second part it's all part of a game loop to incentivise posting: you post, people read it, they like it, so you get karma, which feels good so you post some more to get more karma in turn resulting in more of the pleasure of recognition and that "score" going up. Whilst it's really up-votes that do most of the "pleasure of social recognition" side, karma amps that by adding a score and all the game-like elements of it, such as competitiveness between "players". (Also note that this whole game-loop is why many social media sites don't have or removed down-votes - with only up-votes pretty much everybody no matter how shitty their content gets at least some of that sweet positive social-feedback, which feels good so they'll make more posts so there's more content on the site which attracts more people spending more time there, yielding more eyeball-hours for advertisers hence more $$$).

Karma does make sense in a purelly expert context to allow people to recognize those with somewhat more expertise (though it really doesn't measure that with a correlation of 1, as people get karma for sounding right, which is not the same as knowing what they're talking about), but in a system like in Reddit it doesn't work like that because one can gain far more karma from just saying something which is "popular" and "aligns with the groupthink" in some political-heavy sub or making interesting posts in the "relax" subs (say, posting jokes, memes, cat-pics) that you can by providing genuinelly knowledgeable expert advice on expert subs, as do it with a lot less effort, so people's karma doesn't really work well at showing expertise, unless, maybe, if karma was per-sub.

No Karmq ＝ No Karma farming...

I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.

No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.