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?
You said it better than I did.
In my humble opinion: Karma (mainly slashdot onwards, even though some Usenet groups had it) and other “Internet points” originally were meant as weeding tools to reassure other readers/commentators that the poster or commenter was respected/reputable and not only a troll/shill/other-individual-gain. This went haywire along the way (not only on Reddit, but much more aggravated on Reddit) leading to karma-farming accounts who gained more reach and lead. Such as the corvine posting guy who finally was banned by Reddit admins when he used alt accounts to upvote his and his ingroups comments, and downvoting every critics comments.
Alt-accounts and shill voting has been rampant, and you could even buy upvotes from karma farms or sell your karma-rich account to karma farmers or indirect advertisers. It has become a whole economy.
My silly cat, funny and gif photos on Fediverse are not intending to farm karma for myself, it’s to increase content in subs, and just like on Reddit, the longer I’ll be here the more I will lurk and less I will post.
I truly hope karma doesn’t become a thing in the Fediverse. But I would ideally like a system where we can ignore or ban trolls, while rewarding content creators, level headed moderators and sound and just instances.
Maybe it has to come down to gold. The servers cost money to run, and people come here to share. So those who share get gold and those who do not must purchase gold. It may even be that the amount of page views per some unit of time must be paid for with gold, whether gifted or purchased.
I am afraid that the fediverse will be taken over my moneyed interests who can afford to run the servers indefinitely and promote content that no one wants. This would at least allow the user driven servers to survive.
Then instead of using up/down votes, we could use flags. Flags for “Funny”, “Insightful”, etc, and one of those flags could be “Gild” that must be purchaseable. Those flags could be used in a similar manner to up/down votes, but with more granularity. Certain communities could automatically sort by “Helpful” or “Funny” based on their desires. Communities could even create their own custom flags.
Since I do not know your background, I will not assume you are serious or maliciou. I must however digress and disagree. I will split up your comments (and I have no more time on the Internet today due to family which I love spending time with):
Servers cost money to run: Yes, servers cost money to run. But not all servers are (thankfully) run on ridiculously profitable costs.
People come here to share: Of course they do! And with less profit incentive, people can also be more honest in their posts or comments.
Promoting content that nobody wants: Therre will always be corporate, commercial, shilling or profit interests. But as long as the communities aren’t always wanting that, these interests tend to fade (just like some righteous reddit subs have managed to handle until now).
Flags (or in my terms: badges): Slashdot was THE community that a lot of us with OC mindset escaped from into Digg and then later Reddit. We wanted to come away from sponsored content, sponsored badges and the admin rewarding mindset that lead to communities being overtaken, corrupted or (sorry) teabagged out of any reasonable community engagement or even few-upvotes-posts.
Slashdot was almost extinguished nearly 20 years ago. Let us not repeat the same mistakes into the Fediverse.