Is your proposal related to a problem?

User score aggregates were removed from the API in 0.19.0 in PR 4089. The justification was that it was psychologically harmful.

I am officially protesting this removal and asking for it to be reconsidered.

Describe the solution you’d like.

Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter. Or, make it an option admins/users can disable at the instance/user level (there’s already an option to hide scores, so maybe expand on that?).

Other UIs do utilize scores, and it is a useful metric for moderation.

e.g. If I load a user’s profile to determine an appropriate mod action, and I see it is a 2 day old account with a combined comment/post score in the deep negative, I really only need to review a couple of submissions to confirm it is a troll account. Not only does that save me precious time, it is also good for my psychological health to not read through all that garbage.

e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score to post/comment count ratio is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered.

Compile it back in for myself and anyone else who wants it, I guess? 😔

Additional context

Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.

If you don’t want people to “game” it or don’t like the idea of user scores, then make it optional and disable it on your instance, but don’t remove it and impose your preferences on instance admins who want to utilize it.