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. But only a little. You can learn a lot more by interacting with users than by looking at their profiles.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Well, karma itself isnt a bad idea in my opinion, but making it visible to others isnt. Making it hidden will stop the karmafarming.
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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.
No. There would be so many reposts and low effort posts and those annoying ''funny'' comments.
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.
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 ;)
Please, don't
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.
I'd say no, I think adding a incentive metric will just cause posted to be reposted and beat to death. Original and thoughtful discussion is better without it IMO
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, @[email protected] might claim to be a member in good standing at /c/[email protected], 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.
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I think Karma was responsible for people always trying to make a witty comment and made them way to attached to their account. I don't think that it's a healthy system an can live good without it.
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ABSOLUTELY NO!!!
Other websites with karma are full of bots who repost, a few year later, the content that was popular in the past, in order to mine reputation.
Karma also creates an echo chamber with self censorship where people won't post anything unpopular out of fear of loosing karma.
I like diversity of opinion. I don't want facebook, I don't want to read my opinion with a different phrasing.
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.
Anyone here old enough to remember slashdot? I liked their karma system. The maximum a post could get was +5, and I think the minimum was -1. I don't quite recall the details, but it was pretty effective. People didn't shamelessly karma farm because there wasn't any point. If you are at +5 there's nowhere else to go.
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No internet points, please!
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.
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No
No.
But if it did I'd prefer if it was divided into categories of some kind. Like, people often downvote content when they disagree, even if the content itself is good quality, or they might be posting legitimately funny/topical meme/jokes in a community where joking is discouraged.
It might be interesting to have a few options for votes, like agree/disagree, high-quality/low-quality, appropriate-forum/inappropriate-forum, or something to that effect.
So I could vote a post that is well-written and on-topic but that I disagree with as disagree, high-quality, appropriate. Or I could vote a joke reply that is on-topic and funny, but in a serious-only community as no-vote, high-quality, inappropriate.
Honestly, that would probably be a disaster in practice, but it might at least be a fun disaster!
In any case, I agree with others who suggest that vote tallies should be attached to posts, not users, at least publicly. There might be some utility to allowing mods or admins to see tallies for users.
Oh, and it seems to me that whatever system is used Lemmy-wide should provide some freedom for instances to handle user/post karma in the ways that they prefer and in a way that works well with federation. Like if my 'FunDisasterLemmy' instance allows voting like the above, when that data is federated if it isn't relevant to another instance it should be handled gracefully.
It might even make sense to let communities have customizable voting. For example, a 'ChangeMyMind' community could have a 'Did Change My Mind' and 'Did Not Change My Mind' vote option (vs the practice in the Reddit sub of replying with a frustratingly-difficult-to-type character), or YTA, NTA, EAA, etc. (though in that case I suppose that's more of a poll option)
Slashdot has had that (but for upvotes) for like 20 years, haha. It's...mildly useful.
No.
No, because karma's a bitch.
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.
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Karma ruined Reddit. Let's not repeat the same mistake here.
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.
I feel like karma is a bad metric to track quality contributions, especially if it is global to all communities. It's far too easy to farm. People that make useful contributions in specific communities will be known over time by other members of said community anyway.
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.
We already have that. Just press a user's name and then you can see all that.
You, for example, created 3 posts, 31 comments and have been on lemmy for ~2 weeks now.
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.
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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.
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Lemmy actually already has something called "reputation". You have -3 sorry.
Where do you see that?
I don't think we should. I think we should get rid of (visible) up- and downvotes all together. There are too many online spaces where you can get status from likes or upvotes. Let this be a space without all that.
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.
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.
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.