Personally, I prefer Lemmy over Kbin because I hate karma and reputation points. I do not want to worry about downvotes, and Lemmy feels so fresh. I can post things that will receive lots of downvotes and not need to worry about losing karma.
Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account’s quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human “bot hunter” accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots “stealing” content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.
I really wish the karma didn’t come with the downsides of bots. I wouldn’t be opposed to a system like the one reddit had with awards where the instances can take a cut of the award purchases. It’s nice to have a way to promote good OC on a platform and it solves a lot of what I don’t like about the karma.
Technically, lemmy does actually track a user’s karma.
It’s- just not exposed via the user interface… as of right now.
Kinda of like how kbin displays who upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy also tracks this data too, and can easily report on exactly who is upvoting and downvoting.
In the case of this post, for example-
In the case of karma- Its all there too.
Comment Karma
Comment Negative Karma.
And- post karma exists too.
Oh dear. I am disappointed to see that. I can understand the point of scoring posts and comments, but what’s the point of keeping a score for the user? Is there a use for it now, or is it being kept just in case there’s a use for it later?
Hopefully it will not get exposed in the UI.
It’s necessary because the website is transparent, if you were to federate with an instance, you’d need this information in order to moderate your instance, in order to check for bots, and various other things, that’s the only reason it exists.
For votes to work, the data of who voted where has to be tracked.
Karma is just a matter of adding numbers together.
I think the data can be useful for anti spam reasons
How are you supposed to comment or post to earn Karma if you’re blocked because of having low Karma?! It is also bad for new users.
I am disappointed by this. Karma ruins whole discussions, and I hope the devs never add something bloody dreadful like that.
It’s necessary because the website is transparent, if you were to federate with an instance, you’d need this information in order to moderate your instance, in order to check for bots, and various other things, that’s the only reason it exists.
I think it can encourage unintended behaviors like karma farming.
I’ve seen similar trends in some FPS games in which during immediate game play your kill to death ratio is hidden to keep people engaged with the main loop instead of getting worked up over their stats.
Just like on Reddit, I don’t care. As long as it’s not tied to my ability to interact with the community then let them have their silly internet points.
But it influences the community itself, doesn’t it? If you have a bunch of parrots saying what they think others want to hear suddenly you have a lot less real interactions and way more “reddit moments”… I like how mastodon did it and maybe lemmy should also provide the option to hide likes/dislikes alltogether.
And the window of correct opinion keeps getting narrower. Any time there’s a chance to gatekeep morality, someone out there wants to prove they’re the most <whatever>.
On any of the popular subs, no one’s going to read your comment in good faith. They’ll see what they wanted you to say and just reply to that.
That is a great point. I definitely don’t enjoy the “hive mind.”
One annoying thing on some subreddits was moderators auto-removing your posts unless you had a certain amount of karma.
The throttles are really useful. But I agree on the first post and the removals.
I don’t really care about karma or reputation points. However, I really enjoy having a community where you can upvote and downvote.
Upvoting and downvoting is fine, because it’s different than having a profile-wide “score”, which provides an incentive that transcends making quality posts, and instead encourages shit like reposts in order to farm points. It also perpetuates a fear of making “hot takes” and other crap because you might lose your precious points. It leads to echo chambering.
A karma score encourages making poor quality meme posts and comments in large quantities to gain more fake internet points. It’s easily abused; Reddit is full of karma farming bots.
No downvotes was also mentioned here, but I heavily disagree. Downvotes, in my opinion are mostly a positive thing. Youtube hiding downvotes was a move towards a “good vibes only, no criticism allowed” type of environment.
Lemmy pretty much meets my ideal in this regard, it has downvotes and doesn’t have a broken social credit system.
There are posts that contain despicable information/news but are useful to know, and I always struggled between upvoting or not voting since downvoting would remove karma from OP.
Downvotes aren’t intended for the subject of the news, but for OP for making the post. If you hate the subject, I guess the correct action is to express it in the comments, or give an upvote if someone else already did.
There was an idea from blahaj.zone who considered making down votes enabled, but have less “weight” compared to upvotes. It sounded pretty interesting but I don’t think they implemented it yet.
Could you link that? I don’t see an obvious benefit, but it sounds interesting.
I like that the total values of both votes are shown. It’s better than the way reddit has it at least.
Agreed, Reddit used to show up/down counts but got rid of it and I thought that was a stupid choice on their part. Reddit also did other weird manipulations to the upvote count on posts which I’m glad we don’t have here.
People tend to upvote and believe anything that already has a lot of upvotes. Seeing downvotes is a good red flag to warn users to not blindly believe everything they see with positive karma.
I think the current system is harder to manipulate than reddit
It is still possible through the API (for now), and maybe the official website, to view the percentage of upvotes to downvotes, but not the number of downvotes themselves
Please keep it every other site has removed the idea of a downvote and here we got total and we can see up/downvotes
I think it’s overall a good feature, but it’s also a bit unfortunate that you can’t vote based on the score that you think something should have, without that vote carrying an additional (unintended) meaning.
Like if someone gives a poorly thought out but otherwise good faith opinion. Maybe it has a score of -50 but it only deserves -10. Now my upvote might be seen as proof that at least one other discussion participant supports that opinion, when that’s not actually the case.
It is weird that we vote like that. I find myself bringing a lot of good faith comments back up from 0 not because I agree with it, but because I think it is a comment worth 1 upvote lol
I hate gamification of… Everything, but if it’s just “oh hey I’ve been here for X years and at some point I got 5000 upvotes / 800 downvotes, that’s cool I guess”, I’m kinda for it actually.
It’s like with videogame achievements. They’re not super important for most people, but sometimes it’s nice to look back at the stuff you’ve played or what you had to overcome. Some are addicted to it too. Real life doesn’t give you much satisfaction in this way.
On reddit it was pretty useful to be able to check if an account had -100 karma before deciding whether to interact with them.
I think having no reputation point is a good thing, it gives no incentive to post low-effort content just to get reputation points.
I kinda like how it is now.
I never cared about karma points at all. I just said what I was thinking. Only annoying thing on Reddit was when you didn’t have any karma at all.
People begin downvoting your post now, because you don’t care. lol
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I think the system on Reddit was pretty terrible and ripe for abuse. Over the years I saw a lot of threads where people discussed being harassed by another user who disagreed with them in a sub, and then proceeded to hunt down their posts and down-vote every single thing they posted across the site. Downvotes for literally no reason other than some irrational dislike of someone they don’t even know, etc. Conversely, lots of high karma posters who never really contributed anything other than low effort posts like memes and pics.
I think having and using the upvote/downvote system is a very poor tool for promoting critical thinking and open discussion. Even posts that contain opinions that seem horrid to the majority of others commenting in a thread discussion can still have value as they can help illustrate the world is larger than the little bubble present in a thread and sub of like minded people where only those who agree with each others’ ideas are given value.
Already disliking that I see the upvote/downvote buttons present on kbin as well as reputation points, so not really even sure I will be engaging long term tbh. Have stated before in other comments that I don’t think it wise to just recreate the systems in Reddit since we will just end up in the same place, with the same issues. We should be better than that. Feel free to downvote now. ;)
I do wonder though what a better alternative might be (and if this has been studied at all). It’s fundamentally an issue with people being emotional and often quite bad at separating their own personal feeling from their voting. I know some platforms simply disable downvotes, which partially solves the issue, but at the same time, I think there is some value in communities being able to downvote spam or genuinely poor content. Maybe if you had to also make a comment - thus upping the amount of effort required - it’d be better?
Kbin does also have the quirk that votes are actually public, so you can actually tell if someone is following you around downvoting everything. That could potentially be seen as a rule violation and lead to being banned from an instance.
While probably computationally too expensive, I would like some system where up/downvoting isn’t about objective quality, but only about personal preference. Essentially the system would “cluster” up/downvote behavior from users like youtube clusters like/dislike of videos and then recommend posts which people who like the same content as you like and people who dislike content you like dislike. I am not sure how many clusters/dimensions you would need though and I guess individualized sorting would quickly become computationally prohibitive as you would have to do a scalar multiplication of the post-dimensions with the user-dimensions for each post and then sort the stuff.
That’s an interesting idea, though I’m wary of the risk of funneling users into echo chambers. Just think of YouTube around 2016 when every gaming video led you down a rabbit hole of Gamergate to Ben Shapiro and ultimately raw white supremacy.
I think karma could in some ways be fun, but overall was more of a liability than an asset for Reddit. I’m glad Lemmy didn’t have it. Reduces karmawhoring incentives
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A big shout out to Lemmy.one. I signed up not knowing but love the fact now. Down votes don’t add to the discussion. And posts and comments that are in poor taste should just be reported. Ignoring poorly made comments and posts is the best way to extinguish them. It forces the writer to improve their input if they care about the up votes. Down votes just make the user give up in wanting to contribute at all. Lemmy is about contribution. For now it is anyway.
Just look at the reddit accounts in recent years whose goal was to accrue as many downvotes as possible. Contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.
yup, I started on Beehaw and realized I didn’t miss the downvotes and that it made interacting with comments sections feel much more in good faith. Later moved to my current instance after specifically looking for small instances with applications and no downvotes but federated with (almost) everyone. I know downvotes are still there for most other users but I don’t see them and it’s freeing!
