No Stupid Questions

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

Hard no on karma.

Glad to see how many folks are against it. Karma would not bring any value to Lemmy.

I don't think we need it.

You can already see which posts are up/down voted. You can already check a user accounts age and post history.

I don't need more than that.

NO.

Site-wide karma is easy to game and not particularly informative. Community karma can be a good measure of how involved an account is in a specific community

I personally feel like community karma is a useful metric for quickly evaluating someone's presence in a specific community. Site-wide karma is far too easily-gamble to be a useful metric, though, and whether you had a post go crazy on a big sub means nothing in evaluating whether you're a good contributor to a small sub

No, karma is a big contributer to the lesser experience that Reddit offers, while giving nothing useful in return

kbin has karma. i actually really like that i don't see my karma here. on reddit i became too focused on it, and so wasn't my True self.

No. I think the numbers game lowers the level of discourse.

I like it for filtering out low quality posters, but as we learned at /r/, that just led to the bots re-posting top posts for karma so they could then be used for spamming.

I think our society is likely better off without a persistent cumulative score next to our names, though.

I couldn't really see the point at Reddit (seemed like an idea someone has once early on that got stuck) and I don't think it'd be that helpful here. If we are looking for ways to differentiate ourselves from Reddit, then that'd be one.

Let the quality of someone's account be measured by the quality of the posts they make.

Please, don't

Nah, we don't need that here. Karma has always been senseless IMO. I always hated when I wanted to post, or even comment on a certain sub and I couldn't because I DiDn'T hAvE eNoUgH kArMa.

No. There should be no fake internet points at all.

The only instance I can think of Karma being beneficial is in highly specific forums where user reputation could be an important metric for new users, or those seeking info. Very limited.

When it gets to something as general as this it just becomes popularity/feel-good points. Not necessarily evil, but no real benefit. Upvotes are still a thing for that social media dopamine hit.

Nah, karma isn't important. If we want an indicator of reputation I'd lean more towards a flair that the community can award.

Well, karma itself isnt a bad idea in my opinion, but making it visible to others isnt. Making it hidden will stop the karmafarming.

We don't need that trash

I don't want Karma, but I'd really like to get notifications when a post or comment of mine hits certain vote thresholds, e.g. 5/10/50/100/... upvotes/downvotes. I think this would help me get a feel of how my posts are received. Currently, if a post of mine gets 50 upvotes, I most likely won't ever notice unless I actively monitor all of my posts.

But with the notification I'd get a nice dopamine rush as reward for posting good content ;)

I think post karma and comment karma are very different things. Post karma is not as meaningful to me, because all it's really telling you is how badly someone wants to be a karma hog. But comment karma shows a little about someone's engagement and longevity. Only a little though. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.

NO

We absolutely need a trust system. I don't know if it should be a Karma system.

Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.

ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.

The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don't know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.

Karma was always so irrelevant for me, I won't miss it.

Definitely against karma. Some retard can say something smart once in a while, would you dismiss what he says based on his karma. Opposite is true, a smart ass can be completely wrong and yet have huge karma.

User karma on comment, not on people.

Absolutely not, karma was one of the worst parts of reddit

I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons

I pay attention to individual comments, as feedback from people. The karma total, though, I never think about it at all. I started just deleting my reddit accounts every 2-4 months anyway. Pretty meaningless to me. We could have it on Lemmy or not. I’d be just as interested in all-time word count.

No, because karma's a bitch.

No need. New users can be kept in check simply by being new, as in age of account. Active users can determined by their history.

Adding a point system inherently makes it a game.

Unless its like Whose Line is it Anyway, where the "karma" points shown are random for each user, each day. That could be funny.

I don't think it would serve any purpose

I say don't bother - if it can be gamed by bots, it will. Even Slashdot's mod/meta-mod system could be gamed by the current generation of bots, because a lot of comments / reposts look fine out of context.

If you don't have karma there's nothing to farm, and that means fewer karma farming bots and better overall quality of content.

No.

No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for "I disagree", which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.

I don’t think it necessarily needs karma like Reddit, but I think a reputation system of some sort is going to be required for open federation to remain viable as federated systems grow. Just looking at account age and post history isn’t good enough if the bad actor owns a server and wants to put some effort into spamming or harassing people.

No.

Yes, because it can be an indicator of reputation of someone.

No, because of the ease of getting it, as well as it can be a basis of someone's ego.

Actually, any number that is attached to person has the same set of pros and cons, except of the ease, persumably. This includes SO's rep system, Reddit's karma system, YouTube subscriber/view/video count, Twitter followers/post count, etc. Adding karma system to Lemmy may have its side effects, but even there isn't one, it may not matter since Lemmy has post and comments counts.

EDIT: In the end, when I'm reading Reddit or Lemmy, I gave no attention to the karma, and instead the vote count of the post/comment itself. Call me ignorant, but whatevs.

I don't see what problem it solves. You can already look at your posts and comment history and see what got upvoted, if that's something that you care about.