There is already a total count of up- and downvotes, but please never add karma to Lemmy. We don’t want to deal with karma farmers and minimal karma requirements to post. I don’t care about the moderation issues because karma brought more harm than good. Please never add that bloody dreadful thing to Lemmy. I already saw a bunch of people supporting adding karma to Lemmy, which will turn Lemmy into a cheap Reddit clone and karma-farming hell. Please, never add karma to Lemmy. I beg you. No more karma hell.
If karma is added here i feel i would have to abandon Lemmy, ive been (arguably) doing a good thing promoting artists over on Digital Art, ive already been accused of being a bot, which is fine, last thing i need is for people to assume im only doing it for karma too.
I also hope awards are never added. Reddit had sooooo many and it was really annoying in the end with all the flashy, distracting “awards” on the comment sections.
I can see how many points I have on every post. I can see my total points.
How’s that different?
Maybe I’m missing something, but what was Karma more than upvotes minus downvotes?
I’m sorry to tell you that an equivalent of Karma existed from the very beginning (though rather than being Upvotes minus Downvotes, it was Boosts minus Downvotes until a few days ago due to a bug). It’s called Reputation and you can see it by viewing someone’s profile in kbin. At the time of writing this, your Reputation points seem to be at 443. Reputation isn’t being used for anything though, and while it can technically be tracked by anyone, lemmy hides that information so far.
[In fact, you can see who gave up- or downvotes to something and you can also see what someone up- or downvoted (or boosted, but that’s a given, since boosting is equivalent to retweeting). This information is out there for anyone to access who spins up their own instance due to how federation works, so the developer of kbin decided to make it public so people are at least aware of this fact.]
Reputation is a kbin specific thing
I was actually about to make a post about this, addressing this issue, but more glad this is already up.
I’m not a fan of any karma system, regardless of platform. People really tie themselves to reactions, likes, upvotes, downvotes .etc to where it cripples them. Nothing they say or do becomes authentic and natural anymore. They say or do things for the specific purpose to get something to validate what they’re saying or doing.
And it creates this frustrating system where we end up having to deal with farmers. Reddit is ingrained with it, because we’ve seen it one too many times. People reposting junk, they get thousands of upvotes and they aren’t held accountable for it. We’ve also seen people perform downvote brigades, hence coining the term ‘downvoted to oblivion’. Where, people proactively downvote every post and comment someone has made because of some spite and out of emotion in regards to an opinion that was said.
And they know the effects of these things, because we tie ourselves way too much into it. I’d like to not see scoring or karma systems everywhere. They do nothing but encourage the worst out of anyone to exploit them. They’re meaningless, it’s just an internet toy that people play with when so many platforms try so hard to describe their importance. But in the end, it’s just a stupid internet toy that serves NO purpose.
I’m a Reddit mod. I absolutely needed to filter users by karma AND account age. The amount of bot posts is exhausting and impossible to keep up with without a filtering method. If the fediverse continues to grow, something will need to be implemented here too.
Have you ever thought that perhaps the reason that that there are so many bots posts on reddit is because of karma?
What exactly makes account with high karma trustworthy when we all know it can be easily botted and then sold?
Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.
First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?
As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:
For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.
Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.
Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.
That could have been the reason there were so many bots though, every new bot account needed to karma farm in order to become useful.
I think the fact you said you don’t care about moderation issues kind of shows the disconnect. On reddit, karma was a crucial way to moderate. I think something similar is a good idea for federated replacements.
That’s also part of why votes need to be public, because how else would you know an instance wasn’t inflating it’s numbers. And the total number of votes would always need to at least be accessible on the backend to order properly. We can’t just get rid of these parts and still keep core functionality working. Sure this can be hidden from the user, but it’s not feasible to throw out.
Edit: I want to clarify that I’m open to suggestions. Please respond with how you think the system could avoid abuse and keep post ordering without a way of auditing/accounting for votes. I haven’t been able to think of one personally.
