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 someone wants karma they could host a modified instance where every post gets thousands of upvotes for free. Other instances can’t really verify whether that’s accurate.
Make a meme instance. Where every downvote AND upvote adds points whether its good or bad. Simply have the points called “sandwiches.” Don’t release it until next year on April fools.
Have a sandwich
Just sandwiched you dude
Can I be next? 🤤
You know something? Until you mentioned it with this thread, I hadn’t even noticed that karma wasn’t a thing here. That is how useless the karma system is.
I say let the community mostly manage itself through the voting, so the mods can only step in for the really bad stuff.
I think that karma is an obstacle to free thought. People prefer to remain silent instead of expressing their opposing opinions while declaring ideas that are more in line with the prevailing opinion of the community than their own in order to gain karma.
Yup this is exactly why people like it. Nobody disagrees and when they do, you just downvote them to hell.
I think it’s primitive.
You guys are forgetting about spam accounts, toxic individuals, trolls, etc. I think they need to take into account karma but just not show it.
How? You can’t see the difference between a troll and anyone who has an opinion that is different from the norm just by looking at downvotes. This just builds echo chambers.
Lmao… The TOTAL karma one had was never important. They will still look at how many upvotes is next to their comment, because that’s a measure of attention. They still want attention.
It won’t make a difference if you can see your total karma or not, ppl will farm upvotes.
Amen. There is not a single purpose for a “karma counter” to exist other than to promote toxic behavior between other users.
“But what about griefers?!”
Report button exists for a reason – you don’t need to bust a griefer twice.
It’s so people can judge how other people receive their post. If I take a picture it can give a dopamine hit if people upvote it, and at least tell me it needs work if people downvote it.
I’m gonna make my own instance with karma…once you hit a set limit your account is locked forever and your ip blocked for 30days…
Soon: “Karma’s getting too high. Time to go a’trolling!”
You’re banned after you get 300 positive votes, irrespective of how many negatives you have. Easy.
In the board game “Gloomhaven”, you pick a character class until you achieve your characters assigned personal quest, at which point that character is retired, a new class is unlocked and you get to pick a new character. Starting a new character is sometimes tough if you were attached to the other class abilities and enjoyed the current team synergy, but the rotation is a key part of the game.
So like, that, but reddit-style
Love this. It’s sort of the same principle as outlawing billionaires.
Genius 🤯
That’s a great idea.
Agree. Useless feature and promotes trash content.
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.
Karma is largely useless. As others have said. Let an accounts posts stand for themselves. Not their general popularity. Just because someone is downvoted on the whole doesn’t mean they’re a troll. It just means their ideas are unpopular. But not necessarily wrong.
I don’t see how filtering by karma combats bots whose whole job is to farm karma. Wouldn’t that just filter new bots until one of their posts takes off in some other community that does allow new accounts to post?
Kbin already counts upvotes and boosts, similar to reddit karma.
But it could perhaps be something that stays hidden for everyone but yourself and moderators (provided you are participating in their magazine, otherwise anyone could open a magazine to see everyone elses karma)Hard disagree. If bots are concern, bot detection tools are the answer, not karma.
Lemmy actually tracks karma. It just doesn’t show it anywhere.
But as an admin I can dig in the database and see people’s karma if I felt like it
Does a user have a separate karma score on each instance, or a total for the whole fediverse?
Well the way it works is I can see the total score of everything my instance knows about. But I only get content created after someone on my instance subscribes to some community - I only get older content if someone interacts with it.
So my instance is about a month old. The Karma score I can see for users of other instances will be the total of everything they’ve done after about a month ago on communities that at least one person on my instance subscribes to. Possibly some older content that someone happens to have voted or replied to as well in the past month.
But for my own users I should see the full, true karma.
So your instance tracks karma for users on other instances by adding it up one visible post at a time, instead of querying their instances for the total directly?
Does it keep a permanent database with running totals for every user on every federated instance?
Does it keep a permanent database with running totals for every user on every federated instance?
Yes essentially. The way federation works is when a user subscribed to a community, the community looks at the server the user is on. If it’s one that it hasn’t seen before it adds the server to it’s federation list.
Every interaction on on each instance is sent to the host instance, who then tells everyone on its federation list. The receiving instance basically only ever listens for updates, it rarely/never ASKS for updates. And karma totals aren’t something sent as part of these messages. So when someone votes on something it just increments the karma count at the same time.
Lemmy is built on a generic protocol not really designed to be a Reddit-alike, so some things are workarounds
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 can see how many points I have on every post. I can see my total points.
How’s that different?
I’ll play devil’s advocate: one benefit I could see to Reddit’s karma system is that it can quickly filter out spam or alt accounts from more serious communities.
The first thing all spambots on reddit does now is repost comments in sports subreddits to build up karma, so it really doesn’t help much.
Account age or number of posts could serve the same function. (Not perfectly, but neither does karma.)
I have never been sure what the point of caring about karma is. Pretty much it only gives a rough idea of how long an account has been open and how active it’s been. 5, 50,000, 500,000? 5 Million? Who cares. It’s not like you can do anything with it besides see the number change. I never have really seen anyone comparing karma or caring about other people’s scores.
The only real thing it did was set a way for subs to disallow posting by new/troll accounts. There could easily be a way for lemmy to calculate a sum of votes on someone’s most recent posts if people thought that was a useful or desired feature.
True, “Karma” doesn’t mean much unless you can refine “Karma” statistics, e.g. upvote/ downvote ratio, “karma” trend against time graphs, last 30 days net “Karma”, filter “Karma” statistics specific to community/instance.
Still, you can’t stop someone from selling a 5 million “Karma Points” account to trolls, so I disagree with showing “Karma” like Reddit.
It was a way for people to visibly see some kind of validation. Whether it was validation that their ideas were appreciated, or validation that their trolling was successfully pissing people off, validation that someone simply saw and acknowledged their thoughts, or something else…I believe people intrinsically like assigning a visible numeric score to their efforts.
I’m not arguing for karma, and certainly not arguing for it here. But I understand why people like it.
For sure, all those reasons. I didn’t really care what my karma total was, but I would look at other users karma before deciding to get into a debate just to get a sense if they were a troll, karma whore, or regular joe. Sort of gave you a quick picture of who you were talking to. FWIW, I don’t miss it as a feature at all.
I paid attention to it in the short term for those reasons - like, did anyone see my recent posts? Approve of them? Disagree/chastise me? A suitable substitute would be something that gave you a sum for the past 1-3 days. The running total was never very meaningful to me.
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.
While I agree with most points I’d like to give a reason why a voting system can be a good idea. It is a way to filter interest or engagement, posts or comments that got a reaction are likely more interesting to other users as well. And another argument is that it gives perceived value to an account, meaning people will not spamm accounts and banning someone has a perceived consequence. I don’t moderate any community so I don’t know if that is effective but I feel like thats a reason for keeping a version of that around
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