By choice. The main developers don't like that kind of gamification, bragging, karma farming and the negative aspects that come with such things.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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But it has other negative side effects if we scaled Lemmy up in scale.
For example, it doesn't matter if you downvote me if I called you a big stinky poo poo face. Because without a larger pool of karma to detract from, it doesn't matter HOW unpopular any singular post is.
......you big stinky poo poo face!
I think that’s how it should be. We all say stupid things sometimes (or smart but unpopular things). Plus, if someone had a bad few months, it shouldn’t haunt them forever.
Keep Lemmy karma-free!
Because without a larger pool of karma to detract from, it doesn't matter HOW unpopular any singular post is.
Voting is there to sort posts and comments, not to rate a user. Having a larger pool of karma serves no purpose.
The purpose is to rate the users. If you regularly contribute good quality content, you'll have a high score.
If you regularly engage in trolling, and harassment, and other shady activity, you get a negative score.
Individual communities can set up guidelines, that if you have a new account under 6 months, and you have a negative overall karma, you're banned from that community until a human can look through your post history to see if you should be unbanned.
The purpose is to rate the users.
Individual communities can set up guidelines, that if you have a new account under 6 months, and you have a negative overall karma, ~~you’re banned from that community until a human can look through your post history to see if you should be unbanned.~~ you'll have to repost previously highly upvoted content to pump up your karma numbers, until you have a positive overall karma.
FTFY, I'd really prefer to leave that mistake of karma at Reddit instead of polluting Lemmy with it.
Lemmy karma-less method also drastically reduces the value of bot accounts to farm karma (for nefarious or advertising use before being banned).
Nah. Reddit showed that karma systems are useless as they are too easy to manipulate. Buy/hijack a bunch of old accounts and suddenly, your scams or crazy propaganda are given artificial authenticity. Or, just use repost bots to farm karma. Really, it was a nice idea but failed when subject to bad actors.
Really, it was a nice idea but failed when subject to bad actors.
God, if that isn't just the story of our fuckin' lives...
…you big stinky poo poo face!
Well then damn it all; what more evidence do you need?!
The poo-pooing alone is a court-martial offence!
Personally, if I was unhappy with your posts, I'd just shrug and then block you. Case closed :)
Uı mın Reddit hæz ė mækſ impækt ðæt enı ƿu̇n poſt oṙ kȯment kæn hæv. Ȯbſtenſiblı æz æn æntı-brigeıdıŋ mejṙ b Uı'm luık 90% cṙ it ƿėz bikȯz v ð "Pride and Accomplishment" poſt frėm EA.
spoiler
I mean Reddit has a mac impact that any one post or comment can have. Obstensibly as an anti-brigading measure, but I'm like 90% sure it was because of the "Pride and Accomplishment" post from EA.
Sorry you got jumped on as a new user a bit.
The karma system on reddit encourages posting and reposting stuff that everyone has seen before to get fake internet points, and maybe what you win is a “more powerful account” for the algorithm instead of everyone getting a more or less equal voice.
You can still get people to follow you and build a tribe if you want without that, and you are also free to start any community you like, so a few mods don’t end up controlling all the online real estate and steer the conversation unfairly.
Plus its simpler. Sometimes simple is good.
So that you can ask stupid questions and not have repercussions hunt you til the days your account is deleted
It would motivate more low quality post spam like we see on reddit.
Because lemmy is all about sharing and discussing contents, not collecting points. The Fediverse is also a decentralized network.
Why should it?
We can see all the negatives every day with reddit.
What positive does a Karma system bring to the platform and discussions?
Because when you see somebody with -1000 karma, it's a pretty good indicator that you shouldn't waste your time engaging with them.
You can take a look at their post history and that will typically tell a lot more than a number next to their name
There were plenty of users with high karma that weren't worth engaging with too.
It only helped with lbvious jerks that you could probably tell were terrible just by reading their post.
Usually you can get the same info just from looking at their last couple comments. Trolls don't usually very much.
I don't actually understand the purpose of karma on Reddit, beyond some sort of metric to feel good about yourself. It's literally just a number and nothing else.
I've seen some people try to devalue what someone said because of "low karma", so I'd say it's a good thing Lemmy doesn't have a karma system.
Karma has become a part of a measure to determine if an account is a human non-troll.
The first step in ban evasion is to create a new account and continue doing what you've done before. By requiring an account to be a certain age along with a certain amount of karma, it makes sure the account is less likely to be a ban evader.
That was the original intent. That it became a measuring contest is separate.
It used to in the past. It was removed in the 0.19.0 release. This is the pull request that took it out (I think).
This thread has some of the reasoning for it, but at a high level the Lemmy devs made a call that the benefits a karma system provide didn't outweigh the problems a karma system can cause.
A raw number across the whole federation would be useless. Different instances have their own cultures, making a unified number worthless. People could also goose their numbers by creating an instance that gives their account unlimited karma.
Instance karma could be useful, but it is a design decision not to show it. I suspect that will continue until there is a need to use karma for moderation, but I suspect that defederation would be the lower lying fruit for now.
shoutout https://moist.catsweat.com
Some find such systems controversial but I like it for very obvious trolls who run around with tens of thousands of negative rep. Makes them easy to identify.
As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it's gamification of the system and they aren't big fans of that.
I agree with this decision.
The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn't a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you're encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.
Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating ("you need +500 karma to post here lol") or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).
*"Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it." (Source)
Because it's stupid and Lemmy is decentralized unlike Reddit so it wouldn't make sense anyway.
Because karma ruins actual discussion.
It... does, though? I always go to my profile and check how my comments are doing before I sign off. Numbers go bigger make dopamine go brrrr.
But it doesn't have an account total karma tracker (it did, but was removed).
I like it this way, you get approval on your comments/posts, but don't have a public 'worth' value to increase - that can cause problems.
There's no real value to any of it.
Attach free beer to point levels and watch this thing explode.
I don’t care why, I just hope they never implement one.
Because it exploits how dumb the internet toy such as a karma system really is.
I like the Fediverse's handling of it. Look, I can post however much I want. Unlike Reddit, where I got to storm to AskReddit because it doesn't care about how much karma you've got, farm karma, wait for a period and then finally be able to post where I want to.
People have sadly tied their existence to this system. I mean, the higher a karma count is for someone, I've noted how much of a snobbish bastard people love to come off as. Like as if it makes them superior, regardless of the shit takes and awful arguments they project.
Karma systems invalidate thought and discussion. Do you really mean to say what you've said because you mean it? Or did you say it because you know it'll garner the most points? Quite frankly, I'd rather be saying what I want to say because some of the time, I do mean it. On Reddit, I always have had to fake myself and say stupid shit just so I can have enough points to finally post elsewhere. So many people on Reddit will say anything and do anything to make themselves feel better about themselves by phoning in thoughts, opinions and expressions. But I doubt they actually believe into half of the shit they say or do.
And when you get downvoted? Welp, be prepared to karma farm again because some subreddits will not allow you to post or just throw you into the spam filter bin because you get prompted by a 9 minute timer before you can post again. It's just an atrocious system all around that has bastardized the way people communicate with eachother. So, Fuck Reddit's Karma system, it doesn't belong here.
That's mostly true I think, but it is a really useful resource for mods and I completely understand why they use min karma limits. ( On Reddit I just have a min 5 karma requirement (posts only) and a larger range that just triggers modmail - filters out 90% of bot posts and I can manually address the false positives. I would hate to have to manage a larger community)
It is by choice. Prominent developers made that choice because they thought it might eliminate a lot of the popularity incentives reddit creates.
Now I don't agree with that choice, but many others here do. I don't think this solves the incentive issues but just makes instances a bit more of a wild western and requires moderators to do more work figuring out what to make of an account.
Maybe it would be great if this is still an option you could turn on / off per instance or something.
It does, it's just disabled by default. Some third party clients, like Boost for Lemmy, have it enabled (or at least it did, it's been a while since I've used it).
Edit: as it turns out, the Karma count was removed from Lemmy in version 0.19.
Chiming in with Boost, and I can't find karma-like counts. Maybe a different app?
They must have changed it because Boost was the only app I ever used.
Just looked into it, according to this post account scores were removed from Lemmy. I'll have to edit my comment.
Because it's shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don't get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.
You know, we kind of do have it and some apps will even let you know. But it's got a lot of flaws as everyone else has pointed out.
You know what I kind of want is a way to see karma by instance. What you're going to learn is that certain instances have rather extreme views (including the default lemmy.ml) and seeing how unpopular you are there while being popular elsewhere might actually make that feature more interesting.
Like, sure he's a -100 on LemmyGrad but he's a 200 on Sh.itjust.works; take that as you will. Lol
I do miss the special updoots like gold and stuff. It was fun