Against Lemmy Karma

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.

thefocker,

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.

BuddhaBeettle,
BuddhaBeettle avatar

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)

TeczowaLesba,

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?

Eldritch,

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.

Frostwolf,
@Frostwolf@lemmy.world avatar

Hard disagree. If bots are concern, bot detection tools are the answer, not karma.

New_account,

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.

Renacles,

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.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

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?

aviationeast,

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…

Krompus,
@Krompus@lemmy.world avatar

That’s a great idea.

d00phy,

Soon: “Karma’s getting too high. Time to go a’trolling!”

glorious_albus,

You’re banned after you get 300 positive votes, irrespective of how many negatives you have. Easy.

AnarchistArtificer,

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

FarLine99,

Genius 🤯

CeruleanRuin,

Love this. It’s sort of the same principle as outlawing billionaires.

jon, (edited )
@jon@lemmy.tf avatar

Karma/reputation is currently a thing here, it just isn’t rendered in Lenny’s UI. Memmy and Mlem for iOS both show totals on the user profile page. You have 806 post reputation, for example

foggy,

I can see how many points I have on every post. I can see my total points.

How’s that different?

BobosGonnaeGetYe6,

Can someone explain how Jerboa up/downvotes aren’t karma? I don’t quite understand how karma isn’t already a thing here.

p_consti,

Jerboa doesn’t have anything to do with it, it is the app you use to access the fediverse/lemmy.

Lemmy has upvotes, downvotes and the tally of those two. Karma is a step further; on reddit, every user has a total tally (Karma) as well, where all up/downvotes of every comment and post are added together as a “score” for the user. So people post popular stuff to get upvotes and thus have a higher score (which some subreddits required to post).

BobosGonnaeGetYe6,

Ah I see, so here, any ‘karma’ that is accrued is essentially just local to the thread and used to rank and sort comments therein.

nyternic,

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.

tlf,

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

traveler01,

I’d say karma was a way Reddit created to create engagement. Many people commented random crap or even reposted stuff to gain karma.

GustavoM,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

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.

aidan,

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.

RedditWanderer,

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.

Kefass,

Agreed

Otakat,

The Reddthat instance that I’m on also has disabled down voting which I’m also all for. On Reddit, down voting very often became a tool for vocalizing what you disagreed with rather than a low effort or inappropriate post.

1jl,

I am MAJORLY against disabling downvoting. This results in VERY toxic comments and content being pushed to the front and click bating content, which is what was witnessed on YouTube and Facebook, and is still a major problem. This is because youtube and other sites measure popularity of content not just by upvotes but by interaction. If you click on and/or comment on something, that’s interaction. Youtube does not care about the quality of content and comments, so long as it is interacted with and shared. This means that inflammatory comments and content and click bate get lots of angry comments and rage clicks and click bait gets clicked because it’s click bait and it registers and popular content that will generate lots of interaction so it gets pushed to the forefront. On reddit this kind of content gets largely weeded out by a quality check, downvotes. While no system is perfect, this allows the community to say “no, ok, just because I clicked on this and maybe even left a comment, this is NOT good content, and should not be shared with others.” It also is a natural scam and spam filter that allows the community to quickly shoot down anything that is obviously spam.

Youtube comments were extremely toxic for this exact reason for a long time after the change. They had to implement a lot of changes to help reduce that toxicity, and probably went back to considering the downvotes despite not showing the count.

Otakat,

I agree with you from the context of YouTube, and perhaps I am misinderstanding Lemmy, but I don’t think it has any sort of similar engagement mechanism?

The issue with YouTube is the desire to push “engaging” content even if that content sucks or is actively incendiary.

T0rrent01,

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.

MargotRobbie,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

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.

AbouBenAdhem, (edited )

Account age or number of posts could serve the same function. (Not perfectly, but neither does karma.)

InfiniteSpaces,
@InfiniteSpaces@lemmy.world avatar

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.

15Redstones,

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.

Skyrkazm,

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.

ScorpionFrog,

Just sandwiched you dude

thorbot,

Can I be next? 🤤

chrundle,
@chrundle@lemmy.world avatar

Have a sandwich

Mach1Greeble,

Karma sucks, i nuked my reddit accounts every 6 months to stop myself getting hooked on it

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