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?
The karma system, as we former redditors know it, is susceptible to abuse (especially on a decentralized platform), results in a drive to repost popular content repeatedly, and is a poor representation of quality contributions. My vote would be no.
for what purpose?
i genuinly cant think of any reason other than encourage reposting bots
personally i dont care at all about karma.
so long as the upvote/downvote system works, regarding post (and comment) visibility etc.
Karma is a great method of driving interaction, but like you’ve highlighted, it can result in a lot of unwanted behaviors.
Other social media is a good example of what to be avoided. People are driven to gather more followers and their content devolves into the lowest common denominator rapidly.
I wouldn’t mind some form of recognition for people that contribute good content to communities, but I don’t know exactly what that would look like.
As far as karma goes, we have a technological limitation in the fediverse, where your karma would be limited to the instance your user account is registered on. They could figure out how to make it work, but I’m just not sure it’s worth the effort. We have a lot of other things to focus on atm.
Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.
No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc… I’ve actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn’t have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.
No karma!
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.
Karma ruined Reddit. Let’s not repeat the same mistake here.
No. This isn’t reddit. Want Karma? Go to reddit.
Well, karma itself isnt a bad idea in my opinion, but making it visible to others isnt. Making it hidden will stop the karmafarming.
What are the uses for karma if it isn’t visible?
Personally I don’t think it should be in use here but interested to know your thoughts?
Karma is just a drug for Reddit addicts. Just let each post stand on its own regardless of who posts it. We don’t need that extra layer of crap. I always disliked that.
I’d rather not. You’ll have people farming the garbage and selling accounts a la gallowshill.
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.
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.
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.
No. There should be no fake internet points at all.
