No Stupid Questions

I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.

Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.

In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.

I have over 350k karma on reddit. They are magic internet points worth exactly nothing, we don't need that here. Though I wouldn't mind being able to award people if they say something super cool. Maybe an award a day or a week to give away might be fun. They're still worth nothing, but sometimes a post deserves a little bit more than just an upvote and a little internet sticker on the post is just the thing.

Upvotes and downvotes are nice in that they suggest that I'm not posting or commenting into the void.

I'm not overly interested in my grand total.

No

I'm a bit confused on this. We do need a way to filter spammers and bot accounts but karma didn't completely work on reddit.

Been on Reddit for years, honestly never cared for karma. It's just there for me. I barely look at my own or other people's profile page anyway.

No

I think instead of karma we should have an activity and age metric, a badge or something showing how many months/years your account has existed, and an activity metric like posts&comments/day so that it's easy to tell an old, regularly active account from a young account that is spamming a a bunch of comments per day.

How would it track positive contributions by a user? You can do that by seeing their comments and the individual upvote/downvote.

Karma is just going to ruin this place.

I'd rather not have karma at all; or at the very least they should try something different instead of just copying what reddit did.

Some servers already decided to disable either the system completely or just the downvotes.

I say no, it was ripe for abuse, with karma farming bots which get sold to entities looking to influence and astroturf a platform.

Nope, it's fine the way it is right now. if its on the front page good. if not people gotta earn there upvotes. Karma whoreing makes it a competion for everyone. Everyone will be out for themselves and it will turn into reddit.

The only use for karma is filtering trolls

Lemmy hasn't gotten a large enough population to need that kind of filter yet, and it would require an automod capability to use anyway.

So, no, fuck the entire idea of it otherwise. Fuck the algorithm behind it, fuck the hidden nature of it.

I don't think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can't really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories

I like numbers and statistics so I'd be interested in seeing them here, but it's just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.

Yes.

What differentiates these systems from more conventional forums is the karma and voting system. Imaginary internet points give people something to chase, and is no different from people playing Donkey Kong or pinball machines for high scores. It's the same basic principle.

The function it ends up serving though, is to incentivize people to participate in whatever culture exists in that particular community. While not a strong incentive at all, even a small one is enough to push people to be more informative in educational communities, funnier in comedy communities, more understanding and empathic in support group communities etc etc.

By combining this basic high-score incentive with the standard voting-pushes-shit-to-the-top, you can create a system that naturally pushes communities to better and better content. This was a key to reddits success in eventually becoming a body of preserved information, not too dissimilar to wikipedia or quora. But funnier. And with more porn.

How would this even be implemented? What's to prevent one user from generating massive amounts of karma on their own instance?

Nah I dont even like visible upvotes/downvotes. Just incentives the complementary wrong mindset for healthy discussions.

Your reputation should be what people know of you not points.

I would say something akin to what the name "karma" implies, but not something that can be farmed or botted. Almost like a rating that could factor in multiple different stats; like age of account, posts and/or comments per day, the overall positive/negative rating of said comments, post size, etc... And, it could all be consolidated into some sort of percentage and history graph or something. It would have to be actively developed and debated on to what works and doesn't work.

karma doesn't always mean quality, it just means which side of the hive mind was your comment on at the time.

No, it's not necessary. Who cares who contributes a lot? If a user cares about karma, then they should just stay at Reddit. We don't need this to be a Reddit clone.

Not for me.

It's already exposed in the backend, so apps can display it if they want.

Is there a way to track it, but not show it? Does that makes sense?

To keep people from farming etc, but to also keep the discussion meaningful?

Tbh I'm also indifferent but I see where your coming from.

I'd like to foster a community where this isn't needed, but people are people.