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?
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.
Personally, I consider my comment being upvoted the incentive. I don’t care about the running total.
It was key to the early days of Reddit’s success, and the byproducts of this approach have produced effects that many view as a net-negative. Karma farming and copying content overall harmed the quality of content as time went on. While it was initially a successful engagement mechanism, in a more mature environment it will be counter productive, in my opinion.
That seems to discount the idea that new people are continuing to join the internet every single day, and will have never seen the older content.
It is inevitable that eventually their numbers will build to a sufficient degree that the content can, and should, be reposted to be brought to the newcoming audience.
To actually stop reposting, we would need people to stop having children, ultimately. Otherwise it is simply serving a necessary purpose.
That is a really good point, and I’m on the same page with you as far as reposting where credit is given. What I’m referring to on the concept of reposts is more akin to something posted by an originating author, which is neglected or ignored, until a high karma user simply reposts it and an engagement algorithm is tuned to float it in the feed based on karma and individual user-influence. The end result is that original content gets discouraged in lieu of limited gatekeepers of the “hive mind” nature of deigning what’s “popular” vs the quality of content sorted by non-karma based metrics, if that makes sense.
To put it another way, it’s just my personal preference after seeing the sheer amount of low effort karma farmers that recycle unoriginal content recently posted who are able to float posts to the top, as opposed to truly original or engaging ideas being encouraged.
That’s for me at least why I’m so turned off to the idea of a user-centric reputation model as opposed to the content quality metrics, that being the individual upvote and downvote trends for each post. There won’t ever be a perfect system, and I’m sure there will be reasons to attack that notion later.
I see. Thank you for clarifying, I’ll need to consider this further.
You’re a really pleasant person, and I’m also rethinking, it’s such a mixed bag of a concept as to what’s “better”. Maybe what really matters is the overall oversight of the instance hosts and style of administration for these micro-communities. I really do appreciate the tone of discussion here and have to check myself as people here don’t need to wear the “battle gloves” as it were.
Thank you. I do try to be pleasant in online spaces. I find it helps me stand out sometimes.
And yes, actually, I’ve come to your same conclusion. I cannot deny that there are some legitimate criticisms of the karma system, and while I personally think that people are exaggerating the negatives, and blaming some human-nature style flaws on karma specifically when they’d happen anyway without it, I am no longer certain on which option is healthier in the long-run. I agree that leaving it up to the smaller communities is probably ideal.