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?
We absolutely need a trust system. I don’t know if it should be a Karma system.
Spam-bots are taking up hundreds-of-thousands of usernames across the federation. It is clear that they cannot be trusted.
ChatGPT and GPT4 has made it easier for bots to automatically write comments as well, a few groups with money can make realistic-looking accounts with different posting patterns / writing styles automatically.
The problem of spam and automated-comments will only get harder moving forward. I don’t know if Karma is a good enough system for us, but its better than nothing.
What’s preventing GPT-based bots to earn karma by writing real-looking comments?
The future of the internet really seems like a dark one…
But programs are tasked by their creators, and if their long-term goal is spam, then we know what their tactics are.
A GPT-bot designed to have good discussions with the community would get upvotes and karma (at least, to the best extent that these programs can do). A GPT-bot designed to spam the community with links or shill a product would probably get downvotes.
So distinguishing between good-bots and bad-bots is still karma / reputation management.
If they’re that sophisticated they’ve be able to game any kind of karma system.
Except they aren’t all that sophisticated.
The current ones across Lemmy are being stopped by simple Captcha questions.
The goals is to remove as much spam, as easily as possible.