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?
Absolutely NO. Karma farmers were always annoying af, and it also makes people mean and annoyingly circle jerky about stuff.
I agree with you 100%, we don’t want to make the same mistakes twice.
That’s a hard no from me too.
Upvotes and downvotes exist to filter bad content. Anything that tracks points per user will just lead to toxic karma whoring and bots, as demonstrated by Reddit.
In my opinion, Lemmy shouldn’t turn into a Reddit clone, it should learn from Reddit’s plethora of mistakes.
Karma ends up being the reason people post content - just look at Reddit and you see it; repost bots, people karma-whoring in comments, posting the same tired shit over and over just because it gets upvotes, etc.
We shouldn’t need gamification to drive engagement. We’re not a single corporate entity trying to drive profits. Early internet forums managed for a long time to get people participating because they wanted to participate, not because they felt the need to make an ultimately meaningless number go up.
Personally, my favorite thing about Lemmy (vs. Kbin specifically) is that there’s no account-level karma equivalent. I would be very disappointed if it was ever added.
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.
Perfect description, hands down.
Also, “Karma” isn’t always a good metric for the quality of a post. On the contrary, even. At least in the subs I was a regular in, posts about in-depth guides, interactive maps, actually useful explanations etc. usually recieved very little recognition compared to (pardon my language) lazy, no-effort shitposts, reposts and memes.
Maybe, only maybe a “comparison” system could work, something like an upvote-to-downvote ratio without raw numbers (“username’s karma is 98% positive and 2% negative” instead of “user has 45,992 Karma”) so there is no real incentive to amass meaningless internet points but others could still see whether they’re dealing with a troll if the “negative” side is noticably bigger.
…in the end, I’d still prefer a no-karma-at-all-system over anything else. Creating content for the sake of offering good content to the community, that’s the best approach IMHO.
An alternative would be to move toward a flag system instead of up/down votes. Funny, Insightful, Helpful, Unhelpful. Then the users could choose if they want the funny shitposts or the useful comments.
No, karma turned Reddit into a hive mind. Everyone knew what everyone expected in each community and would push people to stay in line in order to not get downvoted.
This
Edit: wow people really didn’t get the joke lol
I like the current system, you upvote/downvote posts and comments and that should be enough. No points attached to a user only to what they post.
Not just no, but heck no, and no algorithm either. Karma at a glance doesn’t tell you anything about quality. High karma users can be anything from insightful posters to inflammatory shitstains to literally not even human. It’s not useful for keeping new accounts from spamming - new accounts are created every single day en masse for the sole purpose of accruing karma by any means for the distinct purpose of being sold to spammers.
Karma also tanks discussions - every slightly big Reddit post is flooded with people repeating the same stupid “in”-jokes and puns that were funny 7 years ago by people and bots trying to boost their karma. The first few comment threads in every post become absolutely useless at best, and at worst, bots and bad faith actors clog up the pipes with ongoing spam efforts and purposely deceitful and manipulative misinformation campaigns that are demonstrably harmful to society.
Fake internet points is an outdated idea that imho, has shown itself to ultimately be bad for communities. I personally think that while Lemmy acts as a great alternative to Reddit there’s no compelling argument for trying to make Lemmy an exact copy of Reddit. Lemmy doesn’t need to be a one-to-one mirror image of a website that we’re all literally fleeing because it’s a giant shit pile. IMHO.
A karma metric would just hasten the decline that happened to Reddit. People liked OG Reddit as a forum to connect with like minded people. The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content. The lack of karma will remove a reason for bad actors to do the same here. It also removes the karma motivation for low effort reposts.
Comments should be voted on based on their contribution to the discussion. That’s a natural way to guide the conversation in a productive direction.
I would prefer Lemmy et al to stay away from broad appeal BS like celebrity AMAs, and karma thirsty low effort people pleasers. It shouldn’t be a place for special events, it should be a place for productive community conversation.
“The karma situation lead to karma farm tactics with the goal of selling accounts or promoting commercial or political content.”
Without karma, they can promote commercial or political content without bothering with the karma farming. Is that really better?
I think karma was used as a way to indirectly help their promotions. High karma accounts would have higher prominence on big subreddits, so their posts were more visible and thus more profitable. Reddit (company) wanted big communities, so the problem was a non-problem to them because it drove fake engagement and made their metrics look more valuable from a sales perspective.
Why wouldn’t it be better? The focus should be on the content of the posts and their validity, not based on an accumulative metric that is mistaken for credibility.
Yep, it’s tons better. Now you’re getting it!
It shouldn’t. Karma encourages the vices we’ve seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.
Couldn’t agree more. I also feel people just say shit that they don’t believe in just because it’s the popular opinion.
The biggest problem with karma is how it leads to a hivemind.
No. Karma leads to all sorts of dumb behavior like reposting the same 5 videos every day, bots farming karma, hivemind because people are afraid to be downvoted into the negative, etc… I’ve actually been thinking about creating a Reddit alternative that doesn’t have voting at all, or at least not visible voting.
I am personally indifferent. Never really cared on all my accounts on Reddit.
I’ll admit that I had a bit of pride in my 550k+ karma on my main reddit account, but I’m quite open to sacrificing this for less toxicity.
Why were you pride about it if you allow me to ask.
No OP but number goes up equals dopamine rush. Same reason I played RuneScape for so long.
It was proof that people liked what I had to say, and that I’d been funny and interesting for at least twelve years running.
The sense of pride and accomplishment, as EA would say
Definitely no. In addition to the downsides you mentioned, I feel like the redditor’s desire for karma is what causes these hiveminds/echo chambers and cliché comments that are so typical of many subreddits.
Edit: Thank you so much for the gold kind stranger!
I sure hope not. It makes people just say whatever is performative or popular instead of anything insightful.
Problem with a karma system, especially as it is handled over on Reddit, is that it will stifle dissent and promote circle jerking. You can vote controversial opinions out of sight even if they are totally valid but simply run contrary to popular opinions. If Lemmy got a karma system, it would have to work differently and allow for a healthy discourse.
That is a good point. I put a long indepth and very heavily researched post with a heap of links to sources on one of my local subs on there. It was downvoted to oblivion because people didnt like it. You have changed my mind as I was about to say I was in favour of the karma system, but you are right, it does need to work differently
Yeah, I think it still needs some sort of karma system because otherwise it would turn into another unmoderated and uncontrollable 4chan hell hole, full of off-topic spam and shit posts. I’m not sure if that’s what we want. I don’t think, moderators alone can handle that.
Hah, I mean, we have GPT/LLM. We could use AI to filter off-topic posts and spam, and hand out karma… Just a dystopic thought that popped up in my mind.
Karma made Reddit toxic and limited the amount of conversing people did on the site. Here we can have conversations without worrying about down votes and Karma.
Personally, I like that the individual posts and comments have up/down votes. That allows the community to self moderate to some extent. That lightens the load on moderators to police bad content, while simultaneously promoting good content. It also means that the community rules do not need to be so heavy handed as to suppress dialog - take /r/conservative as an example.
But I do not believe that those votes should carry over to any kind of metric that affects users or communities in other ways. Perhaps a hidden metric available for moderators is useful for identifying problematic posters. But any kind of publicly visible metrics turn into some obnoxious internet point scoring game that invites shitposters and spammers and bot farmers.
