Another Reddit refugee here,
I think we’re all familiar with the Karma system on Reddit. Do you think Lemmy should have something similar? Because I can see cases for and against it.
For: a way to tracking quality contributions by a user, quantifying reputation. Useful to keep new accounts from spamming communities.
Against: Often not a useful metric, can be botted or otherwise unearned (see u/spez), maybe we should have something else?
What do you all think?
Id say no. Karma leads to gamification and gamification leads to enshittification.
I’d rather have lower traffic and higher quality. Karma is of real benefit only to commercial owners, not users.
I think it’s good for dealing with communities that don’t want newly created users to interact, or even limit the appearance of how much karma you can do X thing.
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.
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.
Pretty sure someone who owns a server could just give themselves reputation points.
Which is why the reputation system can’t be based on something the user’s server says, but must be based on third parties the person checking the reputation trusts.
To give an example, @zaktakespictures@social.goodanser.com might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/photography@lemmy.world, having first posted 8 days ago, last posted today, posted 4 times in total.
You can check that manually by looking at the user page on lemmy.world and see that the posts were not removed by the community’s moderators, but you cannot check that the account is not banned as far as I know. What I have in mind would let your server query that sort of thing automatically and set up lists of communities you’ll trust to vouch for users.
There could be several options to deal with a user who doesn’t have reputation, such as not letting them post, holding their posts for moderation, or having a spam filter scrutinize their posts.
There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.
One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.
I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.
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.
I Gota downvote this idea. Karma was my least favorite part about Reddit
I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.
I liked my magic internet points number, man.
This. We can meme on them all day long, and we know they’re worthless, but they feel nice. Oldest account had 40k+ because of a sick quilt my grandmother made.
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.
You said it better than I did.
In my humble opinion: Karma (mainly slashdot onwards, even though some Usenet groups had it) and other “Internet points” originally were meant as weeding tools to reassure other readers/commentators that the poster or commenter was respected/reputable and not only a troll/shill/other-individual-gain. This went haywire along the way (not only on Reddit, but much more aggravated on Reddit) leading to karma-farming accounts who gained more reach and lead. Such as the corvine posting guy who finally was banned by Reddit admins when he used alt accounts to upvote his and his ingroups comments, and downvoting every critics comments.
Alt-accounts and shill voting has been rampant, and you could even buy upvotes from karma farms or sell your karma-rich account to karma farmers or indirect advertisers. It has become a whole economy.
My silly cat, funny and gif photos on Fediverse are not intending to farm karma for myself, it’s to increase content in subs, and just like on Reddit, the longer I’ll be here the more I will lurk and less I will post.
I truly hope karma doesn’t become a thing in the Fediverse. But I would ideally like a system where we can ignore or ban trolls, while rewarding content creators, level headed moderators and sound and just instances.
Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.
I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.
Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for “Funny”, “Insightful”, etc, and one of those flags could be “Gild” that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by “Helpful” or “Funny” based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.
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.
What’s preventing GPT-based bots to earn karma by writing real-looking comments?
The future of the internet really seems like a dark one…
But programs are tasked by their creators, and if their long-term goal is spam, then we know what their tactics are.
A GPT-bot designed to have good discussions with the community would get upvotes and karma (at least, to the best extent that these programs can do). A GPT-bot designed to spam the community with links or shill a product would probably get downvotes.
So distinguishing between good-bots and bad-bots is still karma / reputation management.
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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.
“The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content.”
Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?
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.
It was key to the early days of Reddit’s success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
