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I don’t actually understand the purpose of karma on Reddit, beyond some sort of metric to feel good about yourself. It’s literally just a number and nothing else.
I’ve seen some people try to devalue what someone said because of “low karma”, so I’d say it’s a good thing Lemmy doesn’t have a karma system.
Because it’s shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don’t get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.
Because karma ruins actual discussion.
Because it’s stupid and Lemmy is decentralized unlike Reddit so it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Because it’s not fun
It is fun when I see a big number and it fuels my ego, though!
If you’re craving some gamefication we have posts/comments numbers
The more you contribute, the bigger the number gets!
You know, we kind of do have it and some apps will even let you know. But it’s got a lot of flaws as everyone else has pointed out.
You know what I kind of want is a way to see karma by instance. What you’re going to learn is that certain instances have rather extreme views (including the default lemmy.ml) and seeing how unpopular you are there while being popular elsewhere might actually make that feature more interesting.
Like, sure he’s a -100 on LemmyGrad but he’s a 200 on Sh.itjust.works; take that as you will. Lol
There’s no real value to any of it.
Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.
It… does, though? I always go to my profile and check how my comments are doing before I sign off. Numbers go bigger make dopamine go brrrr.
As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.
I agree with this decision.
The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.
Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).
*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)
I don’t care why, I just hope they never implement one.
It used to in the past. It was removed in the 0.19.0 release. This is the pull request that took it out (I think).
This thread has some of the reasoning for it, but at a high level the Lemmy devs made a call that the benefits a karma system provide didn’t outweigh the problems a karma system can cause.
It is by choice. Prominent developers made that choice because they thought it might eliminate a lot of the popularity incentives reddit creates.
Now I don’t agree with that choice, but many others here do. I don’t think this solves the incentive issues but just makes instances a bit more of a wild western and requires moderators to do more work figuring out what to make of an account.
Maybe it would be great if this is still an option you could turn on / off per instance or something.
Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.
The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.
You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.
Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.
I do miss the special updoots like gold and stuff. It was fun
Why should it?
We can see all the negatives every day with reddit.
What positive does a Karma system bring to the platform and discussions?
Eh, it could help discern trolls (like when a user has -6900 Karma, you know they have dogshit takes) and could inspire actually insightful commentary (since it’s usually the more ingenious comments that get upvotes). But on the other hand, there are definitely some big cons to having a Karma-like system.
Honestly, a person’s actual post history should be more relevant and indicative to whether they’renworth engaging with tham a single number.
Furthermore, aside from deliberate trolls, most comments or posts should be assessed on their own merits, irrespective of the poster’s history.
People are complex, and it’s possible that raving political idiots might have thoughtful opinions on their favourite video game or the aspects that make a perfect butt.
Many years ago on reddit, you could get given gold. It gave you paid benefits. My comments earned me literally years worth of gold, and my karma was similarly increasing.
Then I came out as trans. Suddenly the gold stopped and my karma stagnated
That kind of bias is built in to the karma system. It doesn’t just punish shit takes, it also sidelines visible minorities
Because when you see somebody with -1000 karma, it’s a pretty good indicator that you shouldn’t waste your time engaging with them.
There were plenty of users with high karma that weren’t worth engaging with too.
It only helped with lbvious jerks that you could probably tell were terrible just by reading their post.
Usually you can get the same info just from looking at their last couple comments. Trolls don’t usually very much.
You can take a look at their post history and that will typically tell a lot more than a number next to their name
