No Stupid Questions

Karma was always so irrelevant for me, I won't miss it.

Karma ruined Reddit. Let's not repeat the same mistake here.

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.

No.

It's already exposed in the backend, so apps can display it if they want.

The only use for karma is filtering trolls

Lemmy hasn't gotten a large enough population to need that kind of filter yet, and it would require an automod capability to use anyway.

So, no, fuck the entire idea of it otherwise. Fuck the algorithm behind it, fuck the hidden nature of it.

We don't need people Karma Whoring.

Karma is a great indicator of the popularity of what you're posting to help you post more excepted things. There's no reason for us to bring the reddit pissing contest here.

I don't think karma was ever particularly useful on Reddit. You can't really differentiate between someone with a lot of karma from a whole lot of low-effort posts and someone who has made fewer but higher-quality contributions just from karma scores. For that you really need to look through their comment and post histories

I like numbers and statistics so I'd be interested in seeing them here, but it's just a curiosity and not in any particular way actually useful.

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.

I thought it did already. what are these voting buttons

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.

No.

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.

No

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.

I can definitely live without it, bit I do miss it a lot.

I liked my magic internet points number, man.

I always liked having karma around as a personal metric, but I never actually looked at anyone else's or went farming for it. So I think it should be added but not made a determining factor by default. If someone wants to look at someone else's karma as an evaluation, that's their choice.

Probably more important than Karma, Lemmy needs flair or tagging for posts to help with categorization and searching.

In addition to that, Lemmy (and Mastodon) eventually needs algorithmic choice. This is one place where the Fediverse falls short compared to BlueSky. A chronological feed of everything is a good place to start but let me decide what I want to view and how I want to view it. For example, if I am person that cares about karma, let me weight that so people with higher karma show up higher on my feed.

No. There should be no fake internet points at all.

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.

Karma isn't a bad idea in theory. But it gets abused and promotes farming bots. I dunno, it's a double edged sword

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.

Is there a way to track it, but not show it? Does that makes sense?

To keep people from farming etc, but to also keep the discussion meaningful?

Tbh I'm also indifferent but I see where your coming from.

I'd like to foster a community where this isn't needed, but people are people.